Emptying the Overhead Bins

Some Spring Cleaning on UA, Southwest, Allegiant, Earnings Season, Instagram, and the Ponies

It’s been unusually cool here at Al on the Airlines HQ the past couple days, so we thought we could put off the Spring Cleaning for another week. But alas, it’s time to make that metaphorical trip down the aisle before landing to make sure everything is nice and tidy as we head into a busy summer. Let’s begin.

Yup, even airplanes need a little glow-up from time to time, especially old 757’s.

Chore #1: Organize the UA Shelf

We took our longtime flying partner United Airlines to task for failing to recognize our Million Miler Achievement as we crossed that threshold on a flight last year. Well, lo and behold, a package arrived not long after that flight with a personalized acrylic desk award.

The desk award was great, don’t get me wrong — but I felt like it belonged next to my fax machine.

It’s nice, and it’s great that this achievement was recognized in 1990’s corporate-office style, but we still think onboard recognition is a must-do. It doesn’t have to be the full George Clooney treatment.

Chore #2: Put Southwest Stuff in the Storage Bins

We were hot and heavy on the Southwest assigned seating saga as they launched their biggest ever change to their customer experience back in January. There was a ton of news fervor.

And now, as we also predicted, it’s gone away. That’s not because passengers and crew suddenly decided to like it. Nope, because as we said, Southwest was never going to stop doing it. Once airlines get the taste of ancillary fees, they never stop eating, errrr, making accruals for them.¹

Chore #3: Scrub the Allegiant Tickets

We reluctantly re-booked tickets on Allegiant for our upcoming cruise next month, despite the less-than-ideal experience we had in FLL last year.²

Scene of last year’s fruitful interaction — see you in a couple months.

At the very least we expected to see our flight times changed, or even worse, the dates. However, we are holding steady with the ideal nonstop itinerary that made us go back to G4 in the first place. We’ll put the tickets back in the cynicism drawer for now.

Chore #4: Organize the Earnings Cabinets

We’d like to say that we’re the Substack “that listens to earnings calls so you don’t have to.” But, come on, we don’t either. Besides, Q1 was all about fuel. You don’t need a JP Morgan Analyst or a Citibank MD or a moderately popular airline Substack author to tell you that.

Airlines will ALWAYS be a business brutally buffeted by outside forces. That’s a totally obvious observation and not an original one and a fact that’s frequently noted elsewhere all the time. But it’s inescapable and it makes working at/for/with airlines super hard and that’s why we wrote about it in Week 1.

And it’s why we’ll write about it again.

Chore #5: Dust Off the Instagram Account

Despite having an Instagram account for some time, our general aversion to social media means we haven’t actually posted anything. While we could post an embarrassing picture from our airline past every day and not run out for several years, we just made our first post the picture of Greenland at dusk that so many of you said you liked.

Readers liked this picture so much that we might just use it in every post — relevance is overrated.

We still hate LinkedIn, though.

Chore #6: Restart Our Flight Evaluation Exercise Routine

One of our pet peeves is the number of flight reviews that came out based on the inaugural flight of a new seat/route/aircraft, etc. Just this past week Alaska flew to Europe (Rome, to be specific) for the first time. The flight was filled with influencers, frequent flyer bloggers and other assorted media types.³ And good for them!

However, reviewing an inaugural flight is like reviewing a restaurant on opening night. Everyone is on their best behavior, the head chef is actually in the kitchen and the maitre d’ has hand-picked the night’s waitstaff. You really need to check in a couple months later when things have settled in and the chef is on vacation and the maitre d’ is sick and the best server’s car broke down.⁴

Stay tuned later this quarter for some REAL flight reviews.

Bonus Chore #7: Al on the Derby

One of our other most popular pieces was our paean to the Louisville Airport. Well, if there’s one weekend to AVOID this otherwise excellent aerodrome, it’s this weekend as thousands descend upon the ‘Ville for the Kentucky Derby.

We love the ponies here at AOTA, but don’t expect any tips. That’s because any real handicapper will tell you the Derby is an almost impossible race to predict. A 20-horse field is sort of like having four teams in the Super Bowl all playing each other at the same time. Our usual advice is to pick the horse you think looks pretty, has a cool name, or whose owner’s pre-race profile story on NBC is the most sob-inducing.

Finally, a quick note. You folks actually read this thing. Our open rate is nearly 48% — almost half of you open every issue, which is nearly double the industry average. If you know someone who'd appreciate being in that group, please send them our way!

Notes

1. We all remember those fuel price-induced checked bag fees from twenty years ago that were just a temporary measure, right?

2. Speaking of FLL, prayers up for Spirit — they might not be flying by the time you read this

3. My favorite part of inaugurals is always spotting the regular passengers who booked the flight with no clue and are wondering what on earth is going on

4. For example, we’ll never forget the time one evening we were in a flight attendant base and the LHR flight was about to got out with an entire crew of junior flight attendants, none of whom had more than a year of service — oven manuals were being read (frantically)