Originally Posted by
pinniped
I always thought YX (the old Midwest Express) could have made it if they'd ever found a way to tie in to an alliance. They seemed to have a decent strategy of focusing on high-yield business routes where they were the only nonstop. Most corporate travel portals won't allow a traveler to pay a great deal extra for a particular carrier (not that there aren't ways to coax the system into showing you what you want), but most travel policies *do* prioritize the nonstop.
YX had good product in the air but terrible processes on the ground. A primitive website, difficult-to-access phone agents, and long queues at the airport if they had any kind of irrops.
So at the end of the day, I wonder if their basic strategy killed them or if they were just poorly run and trying to "go it alone" with minimal partnerships in a world where the global alliance is King.
Most people forget that up until the Sept. 11 attacks, Midwest was profitable. In fact they and Southwest were really the only two consistently profitable airlines at the time. But Midwest was hugely dependent on the business market and a few key clients, and so suffered pretty bad. Their demise, or at least failure to recover, had more to do with them abandoning the pure mid-tier product and trying to implement discount-like services, particularly with a route structure that was based out of the Midwest and lousy for a lot of important city pairs.
They had a code-share with North West and Delta for a while, so they were not completely on their own.