Delta Struggles with Elite Overproduction
fortune.com
fortune.com
I wish these disclaimers went upfront, the way a newspaper by-line would have been. I've never engaged much with Fortune anyway, but this makes me much less interested in doing so moving forward--if I wanted to know what an LLM thought of airport lounge crowding, I could ask one myself.
It’s especially appalling that a company service meant to sell experiences is literally complaining about too many people having too much money. What the fuck are they paying their MBAs for, to create spin? Come up with services and products and experiences to sell, you numpties!
Personally I'm much more interested in issues that people don't talk about -- such as the "scope clause" that keeps aircraft like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
out of American skies. Smaller airports are served only by crappy 50-seat jets that manufacturers no longer make. If they could upgrade to 70-90 state-of-the-art jets they could provide a cheaper and more attractive service that would fill the seats. Most organizations in my town rate the "quality of the airport" as the worst challenge they have in their environment.
Real elites fly on private jets. You can cross the pond faster in one of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulfstream_G650/G700/G800
than you can on a 7(7|8)7.
They generally only use their De Havilland turboprops if the flight operates out of Billy Bishop instead of Pearson. The advantage of Billy Bishop is that you can literally walk to the Rogers Centre or the CN tower in less than 20 minutes from Billy Bishop, so that’s a decent trade off.
I don’t care about airport lounges per se, but more about the lack of imagination from service providers and experience sellers. It’s not a problem that more people have more money to spend! Figure out how to separate them from it.
I've read a lot about luxury car, watch and other brands that make ultra-rich customers jump through hoops, other than financial, to prove themselves to be worthy to buy their most wanted products. Makes no sense to me -- luxury for me is spending my money and being served, but hey, I'm not ultra-rich.
I've also read that luxury brands have resisted selling their wares online, I mean, they assume that if you want their products you're going to go to their intimidating stores on 5th Avenue.
The other feature often misattributed to luxury is desirability, but people choose experiences based on flexible criteria, and this means they’ll often choose something that’s not necessarily luxurious like a Michelin-starred restaurant over a mom-and-pop noodle shop they like for the “homey” vibes. But the point is that they’ll spend their money one way or another on some experience, and that experience may not necessarily be luxurious or exclusive.
But note also that exclusive environments aren’t always for status symbol purposes, but sometimes a necessity for people who may desire not to be publicly exposed at all times. Circling back to airport lounges, there’s a lot that can be done to create stellar experiences which aren’t exactly luxurious but still money-makers for service providers. Complaining about people having too much money sounds really dumb to me.