Originally Posted by
star_world
You've created another argument for argument's sake.
Not really. You don't seem willing to entertain another opinion on the matter without attempting to slam that person.
Originally Posted by
star_world
You posted above that they should be focusing on trying to improve their on-time performance instead of trying to reduce the payouts.
Correct. When an airline like CO is plagued with last, or near-last on-time performance on a regular basis, I think their focus should be on fixing that rather than $50 of funny money here or there.
Originally Posted by
star_world
None of what you've posted here changes the fact that these events happen so infrequently that they just aren't going to impact that number. And that's being generous - I highly doubt that every departure where there is an IDB or VDB situation is delayed because of the process in place.
I did not say this was a cause of their delays. If anything it's a possibility, but I said it was a matter of priorities for the airline, not a cause.
Originally Posted by
star_world
That's my personal experience - but I'm not drawing a conclusion from that which says that this is the norm. You are taking your one personal experience and extrapolating that to being a reason behind CO's on-time performance. EWR is a much more significant reason IMO.
And neither am I. I just gave an anecdote of my experience, much like you did. Whether their VDB lowballing makes a material impact to their on-time performance, we don't know.
As for EWR, CO outperforms most other airlines at EWR, and other airlines have their own hub challenges, so that seems like a red herring IMO.
The real question is whether a moderately higher-than-normal IDB rate is indicative of a good business model or a bad one. Arguments have been made for why higher IDB could contribute to CO's bottom line (the cost of 1700 IDB compensations may well be dwarfed by the savings in paying $250 per VDB instead of UA's flat $400).
Good point. Though since this is FlyerTalk, not AirlineExecutiveTalk, I'm looking at this from the flyer's or customer's perspective, and in general, I think most customers would agree that IDBs are a bad thing. Smisek and CO can do all the number crunching and set their policies as they see fit.