canadiancow

You may have done what was best for you, but looking at 33 tonight, the 40 seat cabin has 38 seats booked, and only 2 of the 34 checked in passengers are even possibly upgrades (there are other situations that could get you on the onload list). Assuming they are upgrades, they could be LMU (i.e. more money), bid upgrades (i.e. more money), or eUpgrades.

It doesn't seem like they're struggling to sell J on that route. I have no idea if people are booking last minute, but J9...P9 3 months out doesn't mean it's going to be J9 when check-in opens.

I mean if the policy is "lowest fare", then SOMETIMES you might get stuck in basic economy. You may be E50K instead of E75K, but you'll still have benefits booking basic economy instead of WS. That's what they're going for.

Or maybe employers will say "basic economy is too crap, we'll pay for Tango".

In the first case, AC gives out fewer benefits. In the second, they increase revenue.

The only way they lose is if you entirely switch to another airline, or simply don't fly. And they seem willing to make that bet.

ridefar

Speaking as one hear who dislikes AC a great deal more than most, and who flies on OPM much of the time, and who is NOT impacted (so far) by branded fares: There are about a thousand reasons to be disappointed (angry, irritated, vexed, pick a synonym) with AC besides the one you mention. OTP. Number one. By a country mile. The constant misinformation around OTP (in bound is delayed by 3 hours, outbound shows on time until well after it is scheduled to depart. Etc.). Concierges that don't know what the heck they are doing and don't answer the phone. Deflating seats. OTP. Terrible food.

(The onboard crews are almost always really good however, in my experience.)

AC will change its tune about loyalty when load factors aren't as high. What goes around will come around. In the meantime they are a second rate airline at best, in so many ways.

And if my employer tried to make me fly BE or lowest Tango, they would have two choices: look for a new employee, or pay me the benefits that I currently receive from a FF program (lets call that $20k, or about $35 to $40k in salary, annually). If your employer wants you to sit in a middle seat with no leg room for 5 hours they clearly neither respect nor value you. You have a choice. And you have the ability to speak up. Tell your travel department and bean counters to go shove it. (In a polite, diplomatic way.) Travel is a huge burden. Flying 100k to 200k miles a year can be a huge burden. If the travel department doesn't recognize that, and they don't think the life of a FF is worth either extra money or benefits, then go over their heads. Because that attitude is bs. Your right, it isn't AC's fault. It is the fault of corporate travel. AC used to collude with them. Apparently no more. So guess what? Time to fight to treat FFers better. No point fighting with AC (unless you control $5m spend or some such). Fight with the idiots that put us (corporate FFers) in this situation.

capedreamer

For those using their personal shunning of AC as evidence of AC's strategy 'backfiring', the plural of anecdote is not data.

While it may be tempting to convince ourselves that AC's management is made up of fools who will come to rue these changes one day, I wouldn't count on it. AC's financial results and stock price would suggest that these moves are working out just fine for the airline.

Jumper Jack

Well I absoutely agree with you that those using their personal shunning of AC as evidence of AC's strategy 'backfiring' is pretty meh, I found it to be cute in fact lol.
BUT... almost every airline in NA is doing extremely well.

Wether AC's strategy truly works or not remains to be seen as oil prices climb or another recession

capedreamer

And almost every airline in NA is adopting similar moves as AC (segmenting customers more closely, matching willingness-to-pay with benefits more tightly, cutting back on perks, increasing the cost of status, etc.).

FlyerTalker70

Spoiler Alert: There are no perks to WS Gold. You get 4 seat selection vouchers, 10 Plaza Premium lounge vouchers and priority boarding when travelling on WS flights. The rest of the benefits I get with my WS RBC card. And you have to spend $6,000 on WS flights in a year to boot! Sure you get 5% back on WS flights (7% if you have the RBC CC) but it's nowhere near UA Gold which I can earn by spending around $2,000 OOP on flights in a given year (i.e. 2 Asia discount flights and a discount HNL flight for good measure) and gives me unlimited E+ seating on UA, lounge access and other benefits across all *A airlines. It also lets me build up my lifetime UA miles so I can earn lifetime Gold status by the time I retire.

The trouble is there really isn't much competition in the domestic market. Sure we've got WS (and to a much lesser extent PD) but what's the point in flying them if they charge similar fares and have a worse OTP record than AC? The only that's keeping AC in check at the moment is the threat of Swoop, their handling of the Aeroplan situation (i.e. your loyalty will be worthless to us in 2020) and the fact that they haven't had a loyalty program since 2002.

Plumber

Not yet another OPM vs Self-Paid argument thread!!!!

capedreamer

Plumber

The reality is that you (personally or your company or some combo of those) spend money on buying a product/service. Year after year, we are getting less and less. You are right in that it is frustrating for people, no matter where the money comes from.....But others are right that any logical person would see that its good for the business to offer less- as long as it does not affect the bottom line.....and this certainly seems to be the case over the past few years.

Of course one is always welcome to go elsewhere, and some have. But most have stayed and we get a new group every year with the "I have X status for the first time this year" threads.

Lets see what 2020 brings.

YQY

I'm more of a lurker than a poster (read pretty much daily).

I should point out that I was one of the status holders that most posters here dislike. Not in the annoying sense (I don't think, I mean I keep my shoes on while flying), but in the fact that I try and game the system to achieve status. I think we all do to a certain extent. My first year achieving status was the last year before AQ*. I had one business trip left before the end of the year and I was sitting at 19 flight segments. Rather than fly YQY-YYZ direct and back (2 segments) I flew into City Centre (YQY-YHZ-YUL-YTZ) thus receiving 6 segments and squeaking out P25. Similar thing happened the next year. This year I didn't hit it, not close. But that's ok.

Air Canada has made it significantly harder for me to achieve status, but I'm ok with that because I understand why. The two years I hit status, I used e-upgrades to upgrade co-workers on trips with me because, why not? Get a little, give a little.

That said:

If I was running Air Canada, I have to admit I'd likely be doing a lot of the same things. Air Canada needs to be a profitable entity; or at the very least break even. The introduction of Basic Economy they feel will generate more income (if I had the choice between Flair, Swoop or Air Canada BE I'd be on Air Canada). When booking for work I'll be booking Tango at a minimum, Flex the little travel I do in the winter months. If that squeezes out a few extra dimes out of my pocket, then so be it.

The two instances I'd do differently:

Fare buckets. Perhaps this boils down to me not having a great understanding/knowledge about how the back office works. I get there's a W Tango, and W Flex... but I don't get why. Is it not possible to have TW, and FW? With the introduction of BE, can Air Canada not reclassify the lettering system to better suit their needs? That way each fare would have its own corresponding letter? Pardon my naivety, but to me this makes sense. Although, I fully recognize that it may very well be extremely impractical to do.

The second, I'd ensure that there are a reasonable amount of preferred seats on all aircraft. A quick glance it appears that there are very few preferred seats on the widebodies with PY, if this was only 2-3 rows right after PY. A preferred seat would give those who wish to have the ability to sit in a 33-34 seat pitch chair the ability to while still purchasing a Y fare. When Rouge flew out of YQY (thankfully it doesn't anymore) I would always pony up for the preferred seat. Work (a not-for-profit) wouldn't pay for me to sit up in Premium, which is understandable, but I'm too tall to sit as a sardine in the back, even for 2 hours. This would also give a benefit to FFs who are stuck flying Y and don't have the corporate ability (or personal financial ability) to purchase PY or J. For the most part this looks like it's being done on the narrow bodies with 9 rows of preferred on the 737 max.

As much as posters here say "I'll take my business elsewhere" the numbers are showing that for whatever Air Canada is losing on people going elsewhere, they're making up for it in volume and margin. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to have low cost air travel with high level of service and amenities. I get the frustration, I loathed Rouge flying out of YQY, especially the gamble (at the time) of trying to purchase the exit row preferred seat as the seat rows were not uniformly numbered across the fleet (sometimes Y started with row 4, sometimes Y started with row 12).

Symmetre

Unfortunately that's not the case at all - WS has consistently demonstrated significantly better OTP than AC, and over a long, long period. There's another current thread on this very topic, noting that AC in fact ranks dead last in OTP among North American airlines, and something like 145th out of 155 airlines worldwide. Their OTP is consistently horrible, there's just no other way to put it.

My own frustration with AC is primarily focused on the fact pretty well all of its competitors manage to deliver a better product - and in some cases a substantially better product - while charging me the same or lower air fares than AC does (since I'm self-funded for the most part, yeah that matters too). That's precisely why I went out and earned status with WS and DL, and now only fly AC when there is absolutely no other option. Over the last few years I've also flown with KE, KL, AF, LX, IB, AE ... even Icelandair has provided a measurably better travel experience than AC. Yet on many routes AC remains the only option. So yes, I'm frustrated that I sometimes have no choice but to fly on a crappy airline that could do so much better, but chooses not to.

I get it that the entire aviation industry faces cost challenges. Yet AC is the only one that's plummeted down the toilet like this. It's competitors - for the most part - manage to deliver substantially better OTP, a comparable hard product, and in pretty well every case a significantly better soft product that at least leaves me feeling like my business is actually valued.

RatherBeInYOW

Really? When you say things like:

Followed by...

That is exactly what you are setting up, followed by the chiming in of the rest of our esteemed self-funded travellers who claim that all of our problems with travel are crappy corporate travel policies and crappy corporate booking tools and if you don't like it you should quit your job.

Yeah, that's super helpful.

And FWIW, I do not currently nor have I ever worked for an employer with a "lowest logical fare" travel booking policy. As others have pointed out there are plenty of other reasons to be annoyed with Air Canada, the introduction of BE and the completely botched branded fares introduction that just makes a further mess of trying to figure out what fare I am buying is just another log on the fire. That frustration isn't misdirected - if I did my job as well as Air Canada product management I'd be out on the curb looking for new work.

capedreamer

If you choose to read my post this way, I'd rather not engage. So rather than going into a point-by-point rebuttal, let me just use this one example: Please identify where I suggested that anyone should quit their job.

Proudelitist

I only want what I was promised when I signed up. Arbitrary changes, benefit reductions, and all the other stuff AC and other airlines do after the fact is almost tantamount to bait and switch. As to how I pay..I am not sure that makes any difference. My butt is still on their aircraft.

LondonElite

Maybe I'm missing the nuance after a few G&Ts, but I don't understand what difference it makes who pays for the ticket. I travel a lot both privately and on fares paid for by my business. Leaving aside the 'closed system' aspect of how much money there is to pay for things, very few clients/companies these days have gratuitous travel policies that allow employees to bask like a Roman emperor. Most salarymen flyers I know would rather cut back on their flying and put up with the travel demands only because there are a few saving graces.

To put it another way...there is no lounge in the world that is as nice as my home, and my bed is far more comfortable than any first class seat...