Originally Posted by
ColoBill1
The way you become a "leading" airline during a merger is to improve the customer's overall service experience by, as a minimum, keeping the better hard (E+) or soft (CO food) feature from whichever airline offers it. You don't "improve" by stooping down and locking into the lower level.
The way you become a leading airline is by providing a product people want at a price that they're willing to pay for it. If all that mattered was having the best product, then all the "business-class only" airlines wouldn't fail after being launched.
Sure, some people might well pick an airline based on having snacks in Y, but a lot of people pick whatever is cheapest for that flight. The only people who shop on features are frequent fliers, who are then willing to pay more money to fly on their favorite airline.
Part of the problem is that casual fliers don't know the difference in policies between different airlines, whether food, standby policies, close-in award ticketing fees, etc. If you're going to have a policy that offers more or charges less in those areas, you have to advertise the heck out of it or otherwise people will just pick the flight that's $5 less while complaining about the worse service. It's not like Southwest could just have a free luggage policy; they had to make it the centerpiece of their ad campaign.
The reason that Southwest doesn't let its fares be advertised on other websites is directly related to their unusual policies-- bags fly free, no RJs, no change fees beyond base fare changes, etc. They actually are more expensive on some of their routes than competitors (their "low cost' strategy is mostly related to avoiding the elaborate cross-subsidization of travel to and from small airports in a hub-and-spoke model), but if they get people to their website they can make their value proposition in a way that a search engine won't.