The data is rejected because it is almost certainly skewed to casual fliers. Honestly? I couldn't care less what a casual flier values in an airline.
You can't run a large airline solely on frequent flyers who do all their flying for business. Sorry. It's not going to work (there's plenty of dead airlines to back this up). You need a large mass of relatively infrequent/casual flyers in order to have any kind of reasonable network. In fact, I would argue the reason the legacies are shrinking into bankruptcy is because they are basically punting these customers to the LCCs- some of whom eventually do become frequent flyers and stick with the airlines that didn't treat them like dirt back in the day.
I'll tell you what I value: reserved seats, extra leg room, an efficient and professional cabin crew who don't think they're auditioning for America's Got talent, reasonable assurance I won't get IDB'd, etc. Doesn't sound like WN to me. How about you?
WN doesn't IDB any more than the rest of the industry does, a lot of people are fine with 32 inch coach for the short flights that are WN's bread and butter, and the other things you mention are mostly a matter of personal taste. Again, WN's customer satisfaction metrics AND their market share speak for themselves.
Maybe, maybe not. Many of us here have said we'd pay a premium to fly a "professional travelers" airline.
FT is how many people?
A "loyal customer" who flies so infrequently is a casual flier, and casual fliers are notoriously price-sensitive. i.e. if Balsa Wood and Rubber Band Airways is priced 15 cents lower than UA, they'll jump to BWBA in a heartbeat.
OK, fine- so how is it WN has prospered taking all these fliers away from the legacies, if these infrequent flyers aren't worth catering to as customers?
Not in my opinion. Not even close.
But you don't have to pay a blizzard of fees or sit in E-, do you? Your experience isn't the same as the typical casual flier, so it's not fair to extrapolate it.
Most people in the US do NOT fly enough to hit the lowest tier of elite membership on an airline (which for most would be 25,000 miles a year). That's over 2000 miles in a plane in a month, every month (and most people would consider the "recreational" flying done by FTers to be intentional masochism). Ergo, the lowest common denominator experience for people on UA is 31-30 inch E-, GM, call the ICC, hi, please pay a fee to check bags/change your ticket/redeem an award, oh, and by the way, you get to fly through airports like ORD or SFO that can have serious wx operations issues, on an airline (UA) that has no plans to add new planes to the fleet anytime soon and has spent some effort enhancing the experience for J and F, but has basically let Y stagnate and taken service away from it (free food, etc.), and spends its time coddling elites and letting the lowly coach passengers fend for themselves.
If you can't see why that won't make for some pretty grumpy travelers who'd be thrilled to jump from UA, and think this isn't a problem, I don't know what to say, other than being in an elite program has seriously distorted your perspective, and you're not paying attention to how much UA has imploded just in the last 20-some years. Let's take my home, SEA- UA used to pretty much OWN SEA as a focus city, for example. Now? UA is hub-only+LAX (UX only, btw)+NRT+some regional flying, I believe. They coughed it all up to other, better run airlines that don't think a coach passenger without status is something equivalent to self-loading cargo.
I don't reject the data or say it's totally inapplicable to UA. I just contend that it's less applicable to UA than AA's and DL's data.
I wasn't really addressing you- I concur that your argument is pretty sound and largely agree with you. My take is that it's simply not that hard to make a reasonably compelling coach product that can appeal to an infrequent traveler. You actually have to CARE about delivering it, though. I'm unconvinced UA cares, whereas it's pretty obvious WN does.