America West FlightFund (Discontinued Program) - Should We Use HP for an Annual Meeting next September?

An organization with which I am affiliated is having its annual meeting next Sept. in SNA. Most of the people who will be coming to the meeting will be flying from N. Calif, including SMF, PHX, TUS, ELP, ABQ, SAT, AUS, and IAH.

HP is an obvious choice to choose an an "official" airline for the conference and get the meeting discounts and free tickets. However, I am worried about their financial stability that far away. It would be a disaster to book 200-300 tickets on HP and have them go bankrupt before the meeting.

Many of you are much more familiar with the situation than I am. What would you do? The only alternative for a number of these cities is Southwest.

No worries, mate. HP got a huge loan today. The could lose a million dollars a day this whole year and still not go out of business. More importantly, there is no way that they will.

Strike a deal with HP.

I'm doing the same thing and Southwest is the only way to go. I don't want to take any chances and have a few hundred people asking "who's the dope that booked these?". Also, what good is a bunch of miles on an airline that liquidates?

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by motnot:
No worries, mate. HP got a huge loan today. The could lose a million dollars a day this whole year and still not go out of business.</font>

I believe that they have been losing two or three million dollars a day.

Middle_Seat, you are incorrect. In early or mid-December, they said they were losing between $1 million and $2 million a day.

And HP is not anywhere near shutting down. They just got more than $400 million in loans, somewhere around 4 times what they lost in 2001.

motnot's right, I'm so happy, the airline I love to hate is gonna be with us for a long time. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by snake (edited 01-20-2002).]

Just finished a short weekend run LGB-PHX-SJC-PHX-LGB and HP came through with flying colors. I was 4 for 4 for 4. 4 upgrades, 4 ontime departures and arrivals, and 4 non mechanicals (there was 1 but they got it fixed in time). Fly them again LGB-PHX-LGB in 2 weeks so hopefully my luck will still hold up.

I booked HP for the Super Bowl in Vegas. LAX-LAS-LAX at $95. No wonder they are losing money!

Hate to point out someone being wrong again, but such is my cross.

Short-haul flights like LAX-LAS are quite profitable, and here's why. Southwest can push down yields for transcons with its $99 o/w fares. But WN's sale fares are not in proportion to distance. For example, while a PHX-BDL is $198 RT (plus taxes and fees), PHX-OMA is also $198 RT for about half the distance.

Anyway, let's look at your $95 RT LAX-LAS. Just to be safe, we'll say taxes and fees make up about $15 of that, so HP "only" gets $80. LAX-LAS is about 500 miles round-trip, so you're paying about 16 cents per mile. That, my friend, is a healthy yield (HP's average revenue per mile is somewhere around 9 cents, I think).

Comparing per-mile figures is useless when the distance is significantly different. Airlines have high fixed costs (some fixed costs no matter how many flights, some fixed costs for serving an airport, and some fixed costs for one flight). Yield of 16 cents per mile on a 500 mile roundtrip is pretty bad. Yield of 12 cents per mile on a transcon is pretty good.

Yep, LAX is a pretty expensive place to park a plane.

But my comment was cavalier anyway. I've paid $250 for a one-way LAS-LAX before so I was quite happy to pay only $95 round-trip.

JS, I was trying to offer a simplified look at revenue per mile. Obviously, fixed costs can vary by location, but I maintian that
while a yield of 16 cents on a short trip may not be spectacular, it is profitable. I consider that healthy, especially in the current economy.

Matt,

My trip dropped from $138 down to $82.50 so I had no problem flying from LGB to SJC via PHX. Loved the miles but had a lot of problems with AVIS at SJC.