One FO's opinion
This thread seems to come alive every couple of months. Rumors are fine but they need to be put up against what facts are known to judge if there is much validity to the rumor. Here are the facts:
1. SWA is currently initiating a serious review of all spending. No external hiring at this time except for pilots & FAs.
2. ALL SPENDING is being curtailed unless it directly relates to revenue generation. I don't know what the cost for installation would be but it won't be cheap & recurring costs (unknown) could escalate easily in the out years....the phones we use to have is a classic example...SWA learned a valuable lesson with those, technology quickly out paced any "gee-whiz" advantage the phones may have had in generating income. Remember, the phones were suppose to directly generate income...they didn't. If it doesn't generate income SWA generally isn't that interested in. One can say it indirectly does but the argument is too strong that most folks bring their own form of inflight entertainment with them & it doesn't cost us a thing.
3. SWA is looking to trim manpower requirements. Having this type of equipment would require extensive training for our mx folks, all ready adding to the demands & would likely increase manpower requirements...not something that SWA wants to do right now.
4. As a previous poster pointed out, you'd have to do the entire fleet since we don't schedule generally (yes not all of our aircraft can fly transcom, i.e. 300s) aircraft to just fly transcom. Even converting just the -700s would set a precedent that is against the company's overall goal...our aircraft are similar & the ride you can expect from LBB-DAL should be the same as BWI-SAN.
5. SWA is trying to return to the investor in LUV stock the return it once had. Our stock is held by many folks, particularly employees, many of the senior folks are only waiting for their LUV stock to climb back to $20-$30 & then there will be many retirements. Convincing the wall street analysts there is strength in the stock is done by keeping costs down & increasing revenue. How to do that when raising ticket prices isn't viewed favorably? You cut costs & adding inflight entertainment isn't the way to do it. If these senior folks retire due to a high stock price what happens? Highly paid employees leave the payroll, the employee to airplane returns to profitable levels (70ish to 1...currently now around 82) & employee productivity increases (we're currently overmanned & hoping folks will leave voluntarily)....all good things to Wall Street & in turn our stock returns to the value it has had in the past.
6. Customer satisfaction. If one inflight screen fails on a flight, that customer is ticked & not happy with the experience. Suddenly SWA has raised expectations & can't meet them. SWA has always been about a couple of things, get you there safely, get you there on time, get you there with your luggage, get you there & let you know we appreciate it.....doesn't say anything about entertainment (even though the FAs, CSAs & all the folks do a great job of doing that on their own). Raise expectations & get no additional revenue in return. Not a formula that SWA adheres to but the former one is.
7. Parker, Colleen, Kelly have all stated recently their view of the entertainment technology pie has turned up nothing that warrants a change in their business strategy & investment. Will they keep looking? Of course, never say never but in the forseeable future (2-3 years), I don't believe you'll see anythign close to what JB or Song is doing.
I have & could be wrong again. I don't believe I am in this case. A year from now there will be another thread on here speculating on the same. Someone please do the cut & paste of this thread early on. Lots of speculation for I'd say reality if far removed from this rumor.
cheers,
.
