Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
For instance, they want to save cost and time by doing automatic CKI. Result: they dispatch people in such a bizarre way that they then come to the airport to ask for a change in seat, which takes people to man the desks. Often flights are full by the time that people get to the airport, so they are unhappy. So they ask on board, where still they cannot easily get what they like, but they slow boarding. End result: unhappy customers, higher costs for people that cannot make customers happy, and slower boarding.
Excellent points. To me this highlights the MiNi idiocy: you tell people that they cannot change their seat online, they have to take what they are given there, BUT they can change it at the airport by taking expensive agent time! How dumb do you need to be to generate a "low cost" class which effectively pushes to increase your cost structure?! Either do it all the way (cheap is cheap, pay for pre-assignment or take your random seat like U2, DY, and IB) or offer relative flexibility that is limited to the cheapest instruments (e.g. you can
only change your seat at OLCI and use the self-drop machines, not the manned counters which could be reserved for classic and silver pax for instance while business counters would be only for business, first, and gold/platinum pax).
Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
So I wondered what the point was about priority boarding. Well here was the trick: they had a divider in the middle of the bus. They first boarded the priority boarding pax in the back, then closed that door, then boarded the "general public" through the other doors in the front part of the bus. At the plane, first opened the back doors to let out prio pax, then the others. Smart.
Very. And further confirms the whole idea that there is a lot of thought going into U2 procedures and operations, far more so than on AF IMHO.