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Comment by jvm | Hacker News Reader

Airlines generally fill their flights by charging the fares that fill them up. But in the case of VA that doesn't add up to enough to cover their costs: people don't prefer them enough to make the costs of their better service worthwhile. That in turn means that consumers' revealed preference is to prefer the value proposition offered by United/American/Delta/USAirways. People might prefer VA to the competition, but they don't prefer it enough to pay the difference in costs, which is why VA is hemorrhaging money.

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Perhaps I'm one of the minority? If a VA flight is available, I'll definitely pay the difference (usually negligible). Every other time that I've HAD to fly some of the others (i.e. a VA flight is not available) I end up swearing I'll never fly that airline never again. I've never had that feeling with VA which is why I'll always choose it over any other...

But then again, I may be one of the minority...

Of course if there were enough people like you VA wouldn't be failing. But it is so that must mean there aren't.

You may be missing diego's point. For the sake of argument, consider someone who is willing to pay $1500 for a VA flight. There may not be enough of these people to make $1500/seat a profitable price for VA to charge. But VA's failure does not reflect the preference of that group.

Said another way, those willing to pay a large premium for VA flights are not "at fault" for the companies losses. It is the fact that there aren't ENOUGH people willing to pay enough of a premium.

> It is the fact that there aren't ENOUGH people willing to pay enough of a premium.

That's all I was trying to say. I think it's judgmental to say that the people who buy airplane tickets are "at fault" but their aggregate decisions are the reason VA is failing.

I don't think the issue here is that people genuinely prefer the service of UA/AA/DL/US, or that VX's costs can find too few buyers, but rather that VX lacks a critical feature that domestic US flyers need.

Service to small destinations.

The population of the US is incredibly spread out, and while it'd be fun to imagine the bulk of domestic flying to be jaunts between LAX-SFO-ORD-BOS-JFK-EWR, the less glamorous truth is that the US out-flies every other country on Earth by virtue of local short-hauls.

The large, legacy airlines have an exclusive lock on offering seamless, single-experience flights between short-haul destinations hubbing through major cities.

But clearly there is a large market for direct flights from the Bay Area to Chicago, NYC, etc. If people trying to book such a flight always chose to fly VA and pay extra to do so, there wouldn't be a problem. But they don't so there is.

Sort of, not really.

The problem with flying is that it's a complex function that doesn't scale easily. Even if we assume there was a large enough number of people just flying, say, SFO-JFK to support a new entrant to the route, there is a minimum volume the airline must fly to remain competitive.

After all, no one is particularly interested in a SFO-JFK route that offers only 2 departures a day.

And guess how you dramatically increase occupancy on your main routes? With feeder regional flights. A flight from a small city to a large airport, connect to another large airport, connect to another small city. A much larger percentage of all flights in the US are of this nature than most people know.

The market for SFO-JFK only is not nearly as large as the market for XXX-SFO-JFK-YYY, not even close, and the legacy airlines, by offering regional short-hauls, stand to improve to the quality of their longer hauls by being able to do things like increase airplane size (therefore flight experience) and frequency.

There is a lot more to succeeding as an airline than offering the in-flight experience people are willing to pay for.

Actually they don't Fly to Chicago, I looked it up because I am someone who's willing to pay moderate amounts of money for a better flight. I'm not paying $2k extra for first class ORD/SFO but I'll do $200 in a minute.

I think their problem is they don't offer enough choices to be a regular "goto" place to buy tickets so they slide out of peoples minds.

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