I got the e-mail while on vacation and knew it'd get quite a reaction here...am late to this one and have mostly gone along liking posts.

Wall Street has been trying to pressure WN to charge bag fees for years because they're the no-stone-unturned greedy types who don't understand the value proposition and how that helped. I think the comparison of revenue gains being negated by lost business really hits it on the head. Have mentioned before how they destroyed Yahoo Auctions in the aughts by pressuring it to charge an insertion fee when they weren't ready for that. By the time the company corrected the mistake the business was damaged beyond repair, but if they kill off the company with a move like that they just move on to the next one.

Presumably I'm the kind of customer they're targeting, as Frontier has gotten a lot more business from me than they have. But I'm an anomaly, not traveling with a family and traveling enough to be an accomplished fee-avoider. I credit a lot of it to going to Asia as an air courier in the early 90s and being forced to pack two-week trips as carry-ons only (the courier company used your entire checked bag allowance back then to ship their stuff).

Giving a worse deal to Joe Sixpack families that might not be good at traveling light and might take only a trip a year or less to have a fare tier that might appeal to me doesn't seem like a good trade, especially if they're also making the FF program less rewarding (many of my F9 trips are awards). If someone wants to take the spouse and kids to Disney World and not worry so much about gotcha fees or having to learn the whole system to know what to avoid, WN has been their refuge. On Spirit or Frontier I've seen case after case of people getting surprised, including things like 50 lb. bags that met standards for legacy carriers getting charged extra because NK and F9 deliberately don't follow that standard, and stuff like that. One fee trap after another. I correctly predicted years ago that separating families to middle seats would be a PR disaster for them, though it's still possible now under certain scenarios.

I would argue there's more money catering to the Joe Sixpack families than there is to people like me. Especially with not having the global alliance or business-class option. Saving distribution costs by making people book through your own website also was whatever the opposite of a force-multiplier is, but when you were offering something different that others didn't have it made more sense.