Delta Sucks!

It seems like in the last year the airline executives have been competing who can invent the most creative fees to try and reduce the extra cost of fuel:

• U.S. Airways started charging for non-alcoholic drinks. $2 for sodas and water, $1 for coffee and tea.
• 2nd checked bag fee followed by 1st checked bag fee followed by increasing the fee on 2nd bag…
• JetBlue started charging $7 for pillows and blankets while others, such as American Airlines completely removed them form the planes.

The list of all fees is too long for me to write them all here, but there’s a great post here that shows you the different airline fees side by side. Since these fees were invented, the fuel went back to his normal rates but the airlines don’t seem to care .

Although all of these fees are annoying, the one that drives me crazy the most is the “Confirmed Standby Seat Fee”. Last  week I had to go to Boston and New York. The best deal I got was with Delta: RDU-BOS-LGA-RDU.

When I finished my meetings in Boston I headed to Logan airport. Although I was about 4 hours before my flight, I decided to go since I had a ticket for the BOS-LGA shuttle which leaves pretty much every hour. If you never took this flight, it’s pretty much like a bus service. You have a separate security line, no seats assigned and the idea is that you come to the airport and get on the first one available. When I checked in the kiosk outside and tried to change to the earlier flight I was surprised that they were trying to charge me $150 for that. I took my original boarding pass and went inside to try my luck with the gate agent. After a few minutes of clicking on the keyboard the agent informed me that I will need to pay (only) $75 for a confirmed seat. I tried arguing with her and asked since when those fees applied to the shuttle and she said something about having a low fare ticket. I decided that the 4 hours I had more valuable then the $75 and decided to change my ticket and head to New York.

A couple of days later, when I finished my meetings in New York I headed to LGA to catch my flight back to RDU. I saw I was in time for the earlier flight (got to the gate 20-30 minutes before departure) and I tried my luck with standby. The nice gate agent told me there is no standby and I can only get the confirmed standby for $50. I tried my luck and asked “what if I’m platinum?”. She said that they don’ t care if you are platinum on a SkyTeam partner (I’m platinum with Continental), they’ll waive the fee only if you are platinum with Delta. After looking at my BlackBerry for the time, I decided the hell with it! I had many emails to answer since I was on meetings all day and less than a couple of hours before my original flight. So I decided that instead of paying them $50 I will take $50 from them and use my time effectively. I used my Continental President Club to get into the Delta lounge to work on my emails. I had a couple of drinks (or maybe more ) and food. At the end I used my time effectively and instead of paying them more money I cost them more money…

So what is the moral of the story? I don’t know much about managing an airline but I know a little about managing a restaurant. I think both are similar in some ways. In a restaurant a couple of ways to maximize your revenue is to make sure that you seat people efficiently (not leave empty seats) and the other one is to try and have the quickest turn around possible. The longer people eat, the longer they take a table that you can use to seat new customers. Airlines are the same – Why would you fly a plane with empty seats when there are ticketed passengers in the gate that can fill those spots and free other seats on the next flight that you can sell? Especially when the later flights are overbooked and the airline ends up paying for passengers to take a flight the next day .