s0ssos

Is it because they feel it is right or they feel guilty?

EdmFlyBoi

Although your statements likely reflect personal experience, as a top tier frequent flier, my experience has been vastly different. In comparison to flights taken on other carriers, including the 2 of the 3 US majors, Swiss, Lufthansa, LOT, and British Airways, only Swiss was vastly superior in terms of the experience at ZRH and in the air. AC provides very good in flight and ground experience to its top tier and frequent fliers, especially the concierge service to super elites. Expecting to get similar service when paying very basic fares is rather unrealistic. The service on EasyJet and similar is atrocious, with basically no ground staff to speak of, long queues at check-in, rock hard and crammed seats on the aircraft, and minimal inflight service. You basically get what you pay for, and basic and standard fare gets you basic and standard service respectively.

RangerNS

Compared to who?

AC is making massive inroads to the US hinterland - TPAC/TATL market. One must assume that USian travelers know something if this was not an abject failure within months.

Personally, an average of 30 minutes late on 5x daily, 2x daily, daily is vastly superior to on time 2x daily or never when compared to, say, WS metal.

Is AC 2019 as luxurious as AC 1985? Nope. Neither is anyone else.

WaytoomuchEurope

5mm

Transpacificflyer

What about when paying premium fares? My recent TPAC featured an MLL with no food options, limited catering options on board, wretched lavatory, and detached cabin staff. On the plus side, my seat was inflated and my seat wasn't filthy. I have status, although not SE, but was treated the same as the back of the bus. At least I get a smile elsewhere. Calin the magnificent made money for AC and now he gets his payoff.

The downside of such largesse is that Bob the baggage handler, Fran the FA, Lana the lavatory cleaner et all will resent it and will act accordingly. North American executive compensation packages are far too large when it comes to individuals who do not create new wealth or innovate. Calin did well cutting costs, killing a pension crisis and bandaging labour relations wounds. He did not fundamentally change the airline culture to something that it wasn't, nor did he really change anything in respect to product quality. He reversed service cuts that others had made, and this was not innovative. He isn't alone.

RatherBeInYOW

Sure, I'm SE too, and I love the concierge. But what percentage of the flying public are we? That is irrelevant to the general public, and even to most frequent fliers, who make up the vast majority of people flying and thus the majority of the revenue.

And when AC is in the bottom few airlines globally for OTP all the SE status in the world means nothing when your flight is delayed. Again. And that horrendous OTP is directly related to the bottom line; AC can't turn a plane in 30 minutes because they have no staff and so you're delayed, but the stock goes up because more flights on the same metal and fewer staff = more profit. I understand why they do it, and the shareholders and Calin's wallet are certainly happy, but I don't have to like it and I can still call a turd a turd.

Yes, let's set the bar at at EasyJet Can you not come up with some airlines that better run operationally than AC and offer superior service, and probably actually have some brand loyalty? Because I can.

RatherBeInYOW

They're making inroads because they are dumping super cheap fares on US travelers to attract them. Which one can do when the 777 they are connecting on to has 450 seats, isn't cleaned properly and is being boarded by three gate agents. Again, this is Air Canada's choice, and if it works great for the share price, but don't mistake this as some kind of Air Canada loyalty and brand awareness on the part of US leisure travelers when the real reason is $400 BWI-YYZ-CDG (or whatever) r/t seats.

rankourabu

You'd be surprised how much brand loyalty Easyjet has (and Ryanair for that matter)
Also, annual OTP - Easyjet 75%, AC 66.6%. Source: OAG

Bingo, in fact, if I was a Canadian frequent flyer patronizing AC - I'd be furious that the guy flying from small town USA pays half the premium fare, and quarter of the economy fare to Asia/Europe.

How many USA-China $400 pax are loyal to AC and "brand aware", and how many would ditch them as soon as someone else offered $395

s0ssos

I presume if they feel that way they actually wouldn't give because they are generous. If CEOs feel they deserve their multimillion paycheck.
Compensation nowadays isn't actually correlated to actual ability (the ability to get compensation, obviously, but not to other things). It is just like the olden days of kings, and more recently feudal lords. Are they worth a million times more than a peasant?

Many CEOs fail, yet get handsomely compensated. And go to another company and fail. Yet they keep getting hired? Why? Maybe cause they are royalty, just like royalty of yore.

Norcanair

Call it what you want. Lowest PY isn't a "very little increase in price" from Standard Y and Flexible PY isn't a "very little increase in price" from Flex Y or Latitude Y.

ETA - well, that's not quite true of Latitude Y, but now we're talking $1000-2000 fares for what goes for a few hundred in Standard Y.

ffsim

I like a lot of what you wrote, but take issue with the bolded part. IME AC is objectively terrible a lot of the time before I board their planes. Excellent ground staff are few and far between, but once onboard, barring a deflated seat, they’re a more-than-competent airline. Still, the “excellent airline from a financial perspective” is precisely why Calin has been able to earn the kind of pay he’s getting.

RatherBeInYOW

I enjoy my interactions with most of the ground staff and aircrew that I interact with while flying AC. I'm sure my having status helps their demeanor sometimes. Sure, there is an occasional unpleasant one but that is fairly uncommon in my experience, and the worst I see on most trips is neutral. I don't take issue with the employees, I take issue with the cost cutting at the company that puts so few of them in the airport or on the plane. Again, I understand why they do it from a financial perspective - run as lean as possible, reduce costs, money goes back to the shareholders.

But that cost cutting makes life more unpleasant for the average AC employee and certainly for the travelling public. For example, when I'm trying to ask the gate agent boarding a YYZ-YOW something and they're a bit snippy, am I mad at them or should I be mad at the fact that there is supposed to be two GAs boarding an E190 but today she's doing it solo because of reasons that amount to AC having too few GAs on duty? I can at least call the concierge line for a bunch of stuff, where they are usually great, but that isn't available to most people, or even to myself every year. When I walk past the service desk in YYZ D when I am going up the escalator to the sterile corridor, and I see 20 people in line and one or two agents working, I can just imagine all the goodwill that is being built up between the pissed off pax and the harried AC employees.

I get the airline business is unpredictable, with geopolitical events, oil prices, weather and fickle pax all playing a major part in what a particular quarter looks like. And thus running lean to handle this makes sense. But from my vantage point as a frequent flier I'd like to think there is a middle ground between $57M stock option exercise events for the CEO and boarding a plane that has not been cleaned with one gate agent.

ffsim

Absolutely valid points and observations, all of them ^

EdmFlyBoi

And the general public pay rock bottom fares and get service commiserate with the fares they pay. Basic fare = basic service.

Go ahead - what airlines? I'd argue that for customers with status that are loyal to an airline, the service they receive at some of these other carriers isn't that much better.