Give them an inch and they take $773 million
notes.unwieldy.net
notes.unwieldy.net
JetBlue estimates a net savings of $30 million over five years by removing
six seats from the A320 fleet, as a result of reducing the inflight crewmember
team to three, and by reducing the weight of the aircraft by approximately 904
pounds, which will lower the fuel burn. That figure includes lost revenue
opportunities as a result of selling six fewer seats per A320 flight. The figure
does not include any revenue improvement that may result from the enhanced
JetBlue Experience.
per-flight configurable seat modules, for exactly the number of people on board, and can be quickly loaded/unloaded to minimise excess weight. Installed seats adjust their clearance automatically based on available space and user's ticket price/options.
http://s3images.coroflot.com/user_files/individual_files/794...
Seats are fixed because bolts are easy. Once you get into the whole latches and levers business you compound your points of failure. Ever look under the last row of foldable seats in an SUV? A lot of engineering goes into securing 100kg bags of meat to an object hurtling along the ground at 80km/h. Now imagine having to do the same for a plane traveling 2-3x that.
The seats need to be secured, yes, but not in nearly the same fashion.
Also cars don't instantly stop. Most of the energy is dissipated by shedding the engine under the body and crumple zones. They have a dramatically shorter runway than planes.
Imagine Miracle on the Hudson. Seats may have flown out of their securements, due to the forces in excess of 2G. Or perhaps an emergency landing after an engine failure, which has the potential to be even more forceful. Gimli Glider, anyone?
To determine the actual revenue increase from those six extra seats, we would have to know how frequently flights have less than 6 empty seats.
I took this into account in my calculation and assumed roughly 4.8 more seats were filled on average per flight, not a full 6.
There are a lot of factors and it would be silly to think that the airline didn't take more than we can come up with into account in their decision.
$100 for first 50% of capacity
$120 for next 20%
$170 for next 20%
$300 for next 5%
$600 for final 5%
What is the revenue impact of expanding capacity? The solution is not obvious, but the author's approximation is more accuare than you suggest. You obviously can't solve this without a stochastic ticket demand model, but 4.8 is much closer to the right answer than 0.
Depending on the demand structure of routes, those 6 seats may have wildly different values and could potentially be worth more than the average ticket price, on average for the airline.
Since this is counter-intuitive, I'll explain why briefly:
Airlines attempt to price discriminate by selling low priced tickets to leisure travelers and high priced tickets to business customers.
The problem airlines face is that business travelers book at the last minute.
Since business travelers book at the last minute, they need to estimate the number of business travelers who will be flying.
If the average leisure passenger ticket sells for $100, and the average business ticket sells for $500, just having 1 extra seat can add 5 leisure tickets worth of revenue assuming they sell the same number of leisure tickets.
Realistically, their model will readjust the optimal pricing changes overtime to capture the most value. Because the additional seats give the model more flexibility, I would not be surprised if the additional seats added more than an average of 80% of 6 seats multiplied by the average ticket price.
Not that I'm saying you are wrong, just that it's not the only explanation of the known facts.
The extra seats are only utilized when the plane is beyond the capacity of the old configuration. You'd need to know how often this event occurs in order to produce a meaningful number.
Until you can separate cause from effect, you have no way of knowing if the change in loading was due to reconfiguration of the seats, or other policy changes that occurred around the same time.
Of course the bastards should still be tortured for reducing the leg room.
EDIT: Here's a related article where church seating on pews versus individual chairs is discussed - and airplane seats are even mentioned: http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=2380
Joel Spolsky was wise to warn against doing what this article suggests (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html):
In one of Gerald Weinberg's books, probably The Secrets of Consulting,
there's the apocryphal story of the giant multinational hamburger chain
where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame
seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone
yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time
passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study,
and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn't hurt
either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every
year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money
proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they're
shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged
in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.I wish that wasn't the case. I'd gladly pay an extra £20 on an international flight for decent food, and I regularly do pay an extra £50 or so for more room or an exit row seat. I know there's a market of people like me, for whom business class is way to expensive just to make a few hours a bit more pleasant, but who aren't just counting every penny. The airlines seem to have started to cater for us with things like Delta's "Comfort Economy", but it needs to go further.
When I was younger, I had more time than money, I travelled many a long hour in "cattle class", but I have some pretty awesome experiences to show for it. These days, I've got less time, but much more money, so I'll spend it for more comfort - but I'd be a damn hypocrite if I wanted airlines to do any less than their best to make sure young people of today can get the same experiences.
I guess to get food that isn't just crap you need to pick your airline. Singapore aren't too awful, and Delta's chicken salad the other week on my ATL->LHR flight was perfectly OK, but that seems the exception rather than the rule.
I listened to a Radio 4 documentary on airline food the other week which was quite interesting. It revealed, amongst other things, that on many airlines there is a budget of roughly £1 ($1.50) per passenger per meal, which goes some way to explaining the hopelessly poor quality. And no, having travelled business class on a number of occasions, that old line "your taste buds are affected by the pressure" has never worked on me...
If it's a morning flight I like to start the day with a plate of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, and a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc. For this they charge an arm and a leg but it makes the whole thing just that bit nicer...
As a bonus, special meals are usually served first and in some cases are specially prepared.
As it happens, I am a vegetarian, so I don't "miss" the meat - YMMV.
Vege option may well be a good thing, will try that one in future.
I fly exclusively on United because they have Economy Plus, which lets me buy an additional 3-5" of legroom at a reasonable additional price. Sure, it's more than Southwest or whatever else, but I'm more than happy to give them my dollars for the extra space.
>implying decreased customer satisfaction didn't hurt their revenue
>implying their systems didn't need to scale because of increased customers
>implying their R&D on smaller legroom didn't cost anything
>implying upgrading planes didn't cost anything
>implying more customers on planes didn't have an impact on maintenance costs
>implying revenue means anything when you don't know the profit margins
Many people dislike this conclusion and dispute it's factual accuracy because they don't want to believe that they'll predictably increase their own agony to shave $5 off a ticket. But, well, non-experts opinion of their own behavior often does not have 1 to 1 correspondence with reality which is tractable to measurement with numbers.
In another industry where profit is the focus, domain registration, I'm absolutely dying for a $100-$200/year registrar that knows what they're doing and isn't awful to deal with. I will happily pay that premium since my hosting bill far outweighs my domain registration, and handling support tickets expediently and providing features I want are far more important than the bottom line to me. If an extra $10/year from all customers means I get IPv6 glue or a ticket answered inside of 72 hours, please, do it! (This is less relevant now, but was a concern for me in the past.) I'm willing to part cash to be treated better in almost all cases.
The fact of the matter is that most travelers aren't informed enough to know the difference between airlines except for the prices that show up on Priceline/Travelocity/Kayak/etc. I would like to see a feature chart on each airline and an estimated value to see if it was worth the extra money. I would pay extra to get updated intel like that before I book a flight.
Yup, and for those two things you mention that you are willing to pay more for, there are probably 98 other things you aren't. Each person will have the things they are willing to pay more for, and most will be different, so for most services, 98% of people are going to choose the cheaper option.
Hence most companies won't give a shit, and almost everyone has moments where they wonder why there isn't an option to pay more for higher quality of X product.
Unless airline search sites start listing seat pitch, amenities, seat recline, in-flight entertainment quality, etc. next to the ticket price when selecting a fare, it's hard to see how these factors would play into a purchase decision.
Even if the data were there, I'm wagering that the lions share of customers would keep $20 in their pocket at the cost of some minor discomfort.
Oh, but the data is there.
At least airline travel hasn't turned into bus travel lets of atrocity and indignities.
For most customers, maybe, but I suspect there's a pretty
sizable portion of the population (myself included) that
will happily pay more for an airline that treats me
extraordinarily well, considers my comfort while on board,
and gives me reasons to shout their name down the street.
When you fly, do you pay a premium for business class or first class accommodation?
To sleep on a 12 hour flight...that would be great!
Although, I must say one last thing: do not bring an infant onto the plane. They're messy, hard to deal with, and give everyone a headache in an enclosed area where you can never get any peace.
My parents had the sense to keep me offboard until I was 4. I think all parents should do so.
The kongjies always handle babies pretty well. And to be honest, a crying baby isn't going to add much to your discomfort 6 hours into your flight.
I've never had a problem with babies on flights. I travel between the states and China often, and there are always a more than a few of them on.
On the other hand, almost every other airline I've flown has been nothing but bad experiences: repeated last-moment cancellations, surly staff, lost luggage.
Even with my height, I have not bought a plane ticket in the past 10 years with any brand loyalty or concern for comfort whatsoever. I don't even really care about the airline's track record of promptness, because the odds are still mostly in my favor it won't happen to "my" flight. I fly on whatever airline [insert flight pricing aggregation service here] says is the cheapest for my itinerary, maaaaybe taking into consideration that I might pay a bit more for nonstop, but even then sometimes if it means saving 50 bucks, for some reason I'm willing to go through the trouble of a multi-stop flight.
Then you must not fly Southwest, since they refuse to pay fees to "free" aggregation services, and you therefore have to buy the tickets direct.
And, oops, you can't RESERVE an Economy Plus row when you buy a ticket, you need to upgrade later, and then one might not be available. I've even paid the upgrade and had them refund it when they overbooked the Economy Plus section. And since the normal seats are too small, that's just miserable.
So yes, a decrease in comfort has caused me to boycott an airline. But maybe they just want shorter people anyway since they'll weigh less.
Ultimately until the information to differentiate between flights is provided at POS all anyone can judge on is price.
A poster below has enough flight experience to know that United has less legroom and he is willing to pay a premium to avoid that. However that is only because he has external to the transaction knowledge.
If airlines want to differentiate their products they need to differentiate from POS backwards. That is a reworking of a vast network of affiliate sales. Maybe they could do it (anyone can book online) but I doubt anyone will take the risk
Take their info, place it in the SABRE (?) booking system and allow seat prices to vary by legroom and then airlines are competing on something other than price.
(To be honest I expect there are things they will find more useful to compete on)
Plus - when I have to wade through 100 differen options of legroom, childcare, airport parking and fligh routes I will pray for a return to the old days.
I have a sneaking suspicion the airlines are right - we do just see them as a bus from A to B.
Why stop at 1" and not take all 31? Unlimited money.
You're not taking into account overbooking and cancellations--having n+6 seats to sell makes it easier to get n butts in seats.
80% of 100 is 80 80% of 106 is 84ish
On top of that, you have uneven demand causing completely full flights, and while it doesn't add 6 to the entire average it adds a notable fraction of 6. Note that nobody actually claimed they added a full 6 more passengers.
Realistically, we're talking about at least a 5% reduction in leg room, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
Edit: premature post.
This does not. There are so many intangibles here, that the conclusion drawn is very ill-conceived. Here's a list of things that can affect this number:
1. The amount of customers lost due to restrictive seats
2. The negative PR which will result from the change
3. The impact on flight price that the company may change after said PR
4. Is the data from all of those references accurate?
The list goes on and on...
It's a nice thought, but there's much smarter people with access to more precise information that draw these conclusions within the company. Enterprise businesses aren't as dumb as we all may think they are.
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PJ-BH720A_MIDSE_G_...
Although I enjoy my legroom, it was hell trying to get my sister home.
my buddy who is 6'8" has it given to him virtually every flight
Not that they would get through with that but still, they are searching for every inch to make more money.