Originally Posted by
Kumulani
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My biggest complaints with HA are the fact that elites can't pick Extra Comfort seats for free, the quantity and quality of the lounges, the outsourced phone customer service, and the selection/cost of the IFE. On the positive side, I like their young fleet, great service on board (most of the time), the new lie flat seats, and their route network.
I agree there needs to be more competition, though the situation is more dire interisland than to the mainland. For the mainland there's plenty of competition if you're willing to stop on the west coast. Though I am surprised HNL-LAS nonstop has so little competition, given how popular a destination Vegas is from Hawaii.
Yes to both of these points! I recently matched to UA of all airlines and found the E+ access to be a huge benefit. On HA, my upgrade rate to EC seats was somewhere around 1/20 over two years. And yes, competition is good. That is a surprising thought. UA just announced increasing flights/capacity to HI, and LAS wasn't on there. It's almost as if no one has ever heard of the "ninth island."
A benefit that I do like is the CC credit for elites. I will be cancelling when my AF fee hits since I don't fly enough on HA anymore.
Originally Posted by
747FC
We can all bemoan the HA FF program and pricing, but it will only change for the better when HA is hurting financially. A look at HA's stock performance over the last 10 years (roughly since Aloha went bellyup), indicates that their executives are earning their bonuses:
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/HA#e...IjpmYWxzZX0%3D
In short, HA's stock is up 509%, compared to NASDAQ at 142% and the S&P at 62%. Don't expect any changes that benefit FFs, as clearly stockholders are quite happy with the status quo.
Unfortunately this also makes a lot of sense as well, and does help explain the corporate behavior. However I'm not sure how it explains the overall CS culture of the company (although that isn't the topic for this thread). Fortunately, I got in on a good chunk of that growth. It's too bad I wasn't smart enough to have an exit strategy. Just sitting on it still.