Don't know. Whip out Flying the Line and you can tell me the date where each airline became unionized. I don't even care if they get unionized other than the fact that if they do, it's highly likely they'll want something resembling industry standard and my airline's management won't use them as a hammer to average down our narrowbody rates when our contract is up in '09.
If that were true, we'd never have any unions. We'd still have sweatshops in Massachusetts and children working in Colorado mines.
I hear ya, brother
I hear guys saying that, but I don't think it's a valid point. I guarantee you that if mature airlines in this industry did have 1st year Captains on a regular basis, the rates would be much higher than whatever they are now. No Union in their right mind is going to waste valuable negotiating captial when their contract is up to raise 1st year Captain rates when they're not expecting anyone to make Captain until several years on the property.
As far as market share goes. You will always have the 3 types of passengers...or guests as it may be.
This people tend to be high yield people and are not price sensitive. Not too many of these people anymore (as a % of total customers), and where they do exist, they provide a disprotionate amount of revenue for their airline.
Yes you can. Just offer the lowest fare. You can get him (and maybe even make a profit) by keeping your costs very low. Since labor is an airline's 1st or 2nd highest cost, what management can do is use lower paid employees. Since costs associated with pilots are the highest part of an airline's labor costs, even undercutting other's airlines pilot wages by a small amount can have a big effect on the bottom line. It even allows you to use low pilot wages to take market share from other airlines by luring those customers away from your competitors.
I think that's baloney. Every customer SAYS they want to be treated well. They won't pay for it, however. If customer service was so important, you'd go to sites like Orbitz, Expedia, etc., and instead of ranking airline choices by schedule and price (the two things that REALLY are the most important to customers), they'd be a ranking of some sort of customer service- perhaps DOT criteria of some sort. You'll never see that because that's not what is most important. Airlines like JetBlue wouldn't be selling airplanes and slowing growth because I think we have to admit that they probably have some of the best perceived customer service out there. Pax care about price. Pax care about schedule. The consumer is getting EXACTLY what they are paying for from the airline industry when it comes to customer service.
