Originally Posted by
bernardd
Quite simply, one business is healthy enough to ride out the current storm, the other is financially hanging on by its fingernails.
The writing has been on the wall for over a decade. CO have had years, and trips through Bankruptcy to figure out a sustainable business model but they either don't have the imagination or the managers have ducked the difficult changes.
It's not so much that the legacies aren't in a position to compete, it's that the managers have failed to get them into a position where there's a financial reason for the existence of the business. The real legacy is, therefore, another 5 years of lost opportunity - simply hanging on, waiting and hoping for a reduction in competition is caretaking not management.
Indeed. You have stated it more eloquently than I did, but I was trying to convey the same point. I don't think either Bethune or LK did enough to fundamentally change CO in a way that enables them to make money over the long-term. Maybe it was cowardice or maybe it was lack of imagination or maybe it was simply being hamstrung by bad labor agreements, lousy fleets, and over-expanded networks. Whatever the reason, I think that LK's biggest failing is that he hasn't done anything, one way or the other, to better position CO for the long-haul. He's applied some nice band-aids, but I'm not going to throw a parade for a guy who's big accomplishment was narrowly avoiding bankruptcy.
Of course, this is the failing of pretty much all of the legacy airlines. Certainly UA and US are in even worse shape, followed closely by AA. About the only US carrier that might be argued to have acted aggressively to change the fundamentals of their business is DL, but I seriously wonder if their big bet will ever pay off, or if they have simply doubled down on a losing strategy.
Regardless, CO stands today where it stood at the beginning of LK's term - a small full-service carrier, lacking the reach to compete aggressively with the big boys, and lacking the cost structure to compete with the LCCs. It was a lousy strategy for the past decade and I think it will remain a lousy strategy for the next one. If even one thing (oil price increases, sustained decline in premium travel) doesn't break CO's way, it will be an even worse strategy than it was during the relatively good market of the past 10 years.