Originally Posted by
FiveMileFinal
And therein lies the rub. The culture at United Airlines is how much money they saved tonight.
Never mind the long-term impacts, or the notion that something like this could go off the rails and send their expenses wildly out of control, with no end in sight. They bet that, with the culture they've installed since the merger, that no one would dare put up a fight. They were probably mad that the offer went up to 800$ in the first place. The most they were going to give up that night was 3200"$" in fake United vouchers.
Look at where United came from. Munoz's changes are little more than window dressing. Things in the Smisek era were so unbelievably, irretrievably bad that Munoz's inputs make him look like a star. But it's still the same rotten core underneath, as what this event exposed. United still operates under the culture of, how much money will we save tonight? Until they address that (and unless Dr. Dao forces them to with his multi-million $ lawsuit), they are in for a long, hard road.
I mean, come on, when you have the king of "You'll be back" in Ben Baldanza dogging you, it's time to have a think about your current direction.
That's not just UA - that's all of them at this point. The government has allowed so many mergers that there's no real competition any more. So they think they can treat people badly and they'll keep coming back. With the market as it is now - they're right. If it's not UA, it'll be AA or DL screwing them, and neither has any incentive to be better.
And now we just lost VX.
I don't think any of the mergers should have been allowed to happen as they did. Maybe a big one picking up a regional here or there or something, but not the big consolidation we had. Back when we had multiple choices and ways of getting there with AA, UA, CO, US, HP, NW, TW, DL, WN, F9, FL and more, it actually mattered how they treated us.
Hub captive? You get destinations, but only one real carrier and high prices. Non-hub flyer? If you're lucky, you'll have a little competition, but even now, that's dwindled down to a few flights a day each to hubs with crappy schedules and connections.
I think we would have had a healthier market and better competition had some airlines been allowed to fail, allowing the others to pick the desirable parts of the carcass in BK.
We all lost over the last 20 years or so. It's just now really starting to come to a head.