Originally Posted by
John Aldeborgh
UA is about to get a lot of very angry letters and maybe about to lose a few large customers. If I were Tim Cook, I would be wild and making a change to the Apple travel policy, today.
Why? This is not exactly top secret information.
Originally Posted by
John Aldeborgh
Senior management and board members don’t like this type of publicity. Anything that has the slightest hint of scandal or political incorrectness is a big issue. Apple loves publicity about it products, not about the inner workings of the company. There’s no upside for Apple (or others listed) with this going viral on the internet.
What’s the big deal? Apple is headquartered near SAN Francisco and has a lot of business in China. So a lot of people commute back and forth. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how much likely business there is for UA. These data are widely known to many people, and as far as those banners go, even the guy in the printshop saw how much revenue was coming from these companies. Big deal.
I used to work for one of the biggest investment banks in London. This company’s HQ was in NY. We had a corporate agreement with AA and another with BA. The travel policy was issued to all bankers and spelled out exactly how you were allowed to travel and who needed to approve what. At one point I was given another little guide that told me that, for LHR to JFK, AA was to be preferred at the company had a $900 J agreement on this route, with space available upgrades to F. BA was approved if AA was full or otherwise less desirable (pretty easy to do what you wanted, in other words.). On the next page of this guide it spelled out the total value of the AA relationship, as well as the money spent on transatlantic travel with the different airlines for the prior three years.