beachmouse

And yet you won't fly NK, contradicting your statement that you will pay only rock bottom pricing. If you were honest about that statement, you'd use them the next time their route fit your needs and post a picture of the boarding pass because as the saying does 'pix or it never happened.'

Me, I'll gladly pay for Delta's C+ and be guaranteed a nice 35" seat pitch on long haul instead of having to take my chances with WN. There are other areas of my travel budget I'll cut before cutting let room.



I had the BBC on earlier and they were talking about the anniversary of the 380 and its relative failure because on routes like NYC-LHR, flyers would rather have 6 daily flight options for the route than 2 daily flights on the 380. The market has spoken and declared the plane to be too big to be useful for the needs of most current airlines.

Same reason why WN uses the 737 instead of a bigger bird for their short haul routes.

gooselee

This. And it applies even more on busy US-domestic routes. I currently commute up and down the east coast week to week.

On WN, unless I'm flying to BWI, I usually only have two flights a day in either direction - one morning, one early afternoon. On the return, my client generally doesn't want me leaving the office at noon, so WN's schedule doesn't work.

But give me a DL, UA, or AA, and suddenly I get 8-10 or more flights a day to pick from. Not only can I book flights that make sense for my schedule and which will make my clients happy, but I have the flexibility to switch flights to meet the needs and opportunities of the moment.

Just last week, I was booked on a 7pm flight home, but had a meeting wrap up early, sailed through traffic, and caught the rental car shuttle just as it was leaving for the terminal, putting me at the airport in time for a 5:15pm flight instead (and 6pm, had I missed that one). As a bonus, the 7pm flight ended up being slightly delayed after a thunderstorm moved in that evening, so I won back even more time.

While it seems that OP wouldn't mind sitting around a random airport for another 2 hours, that schedule flexibility meant I got to get home and have dinner with Mrs. Lee that evening rather than scarfing down a nasty airport burrito and schlepping into my house when everyone else is halfway to bed.

Sorry, OP, but that 2 hours of my life is worth a very great deal to me. I can make all the money in the world, but I cannot make more time.

BiggAW

God. Are they trying to be more hated? What are they going to 30" pitch now? That's just ridiculous! It proves that it's just a racket. Steal legroom and sell it back at a higher price. Just like the mafia!

The A380 needs long routes to make sense. We're not at the congestion point where we need planes that big, but I think it would make sense for all US-LHR flights, and probably US-CDG flights to be A380's. I know there are some JFK-CDG flights that are using AF A380's, and maybe a few others. I do think it would make sense for an all-economy A380 to fly between some combinations, including domestic, of JFK/ATL/DTW/IAD, CDG/LHR, and SFO/LAX. The benefits would really be in capacity at airports like LHR and CDG, since even airports like JFK and IAD would have more than enough capacity if they were properly managed, with JFK being de-hubbed, and both only accepting 143 seat plus aircraft.

Why creepy? It's too bad that airlines aren't ordering the 853 person A380 configuration. The 747 can already carry 605 when properly configured.

Airbus is going to offering 11-across, not sure if they could do that on the entire plane, or if that would go over the 853 that it's certified for.

They don't really offer anything that's useful to me. If I'm going to the west coast or internationally, it's sometimes worth it to go to JFK/LGA, but for shorter trips, if I add the cost to travel there plus the ticket, it doesn't make sense. Besides, I don't fit in NK's 28" seat pitch. I'm glad they're doing what they're doing, but it doesn't work for people of my height. I need the roominess of WN.

WN has adequate legroom on all their planes. They're all just about the same, with slight variations between the various 737 flavors they fly.

That's not the market, that's stubborn American carriers like DL. AF and others have embraced the fewer, larger flights model, which is why there are a number of US cities with A380 service, just not by a US carrier.

Not really. The 737 is the sweet spot, that's why there are more 737's than anything else in the world. They can get into a lot of airports larger planes can't, and they scale up and down well. Domestic hour flights are a different animal than flying from here to Europe or even nonstop transcons (although WN has a few of those, I'll be doing SEA-BWI to connect to BWI-BDL in a few weeks). The 737 is also getting bigger (longer), and WN will be following that trend to keep an all-737 fleet, but use the variations to provide varying levels of service as various cities demand.

And? Apparently that exactly route doesn't demand more than 2 flights a day.

On what, rinky-dink POS little planes? 2 flights a day is more than adequate. They're scheduled anyway, so figure it out from there.

Don't you have to pay a change fee or something to do that? I've seen the one flight before leaving while I'm getting into the airport once or twice, with mine an hour or two later and joked about it, but whatever, that's just part of flying, better to have a nicely padded connection than be rushed. The whole airplane thing takes time, I plan accordingly.

You can make up all sorts of scenarios as to why you'd want to be a certain place at a certain time, but really, WN's flights are based on how to most efficiently utilize WN's fleet, and that's a good thing. Efficient equipment utilization means lower costs, lower costs mean lower fares.

Luckily for my flight to DTW, which gets in at the kind of awkward 17:30 in DTW, the fares were so low that overrode anyone else in my party's desire to fly direct on DL and get there for dinner, so now I don't have to deal with DL! You just can't argue with $178 on WN vs. $382 on DL. Granted, if it were the other way around, of course I would have put up with DL's shenanigans and sacrificed my knees for the lower fare. If it's a tie, since they seem to scrape each other's sites all the time, WN via BWI wins automatically over the nonstop DL flight.

BiggAW

OMG, that flight isn't $382, it's $402. I didn't realize $382 is their new basic economy. Talk about another way to screw people. What a bunch of BS that is. Are they trying to lose customers? It sure seems like it! First the Economy Plus BS, and now this BS. They're worse than the rental car companies that have invented new categories of cars that don't exist in real life to add more price tiers.

gooselee

Did you even read my post? The route clearly demands more than two flights a day because the legacy carriers offer 8-10 flights a day.

Those flights on DL are operated by M90s and 757s. Not exactly rinky-dink planes, though admittedly not your beloved 737s. But my goal is to get from A to B at the time that I need to. If that means flying on an RJ, I'll survive for a couple hours. Also, I cannot "figure it out from there" from WN's precious schedule. Quite literally, I would not be able to do my job if I had to leave the office at noon in order to catch the one WN afternoon flight each day. Not all of us have the free time and flexibility that you apparently do, thus we demand flexibility from the airlines we fly.

For various reasons, I usually do not have to pay change fees. Sometimes I do. It's always worth it.

WN operating their fleet efficiently is their business. When those operations don't meet my needs, which I am paying the airline to satisfy, then me taking my travel dollars elsewhere is my business. Neither are your business.

Actually, I can argue with that. The fact that I can keep my clients and livelihood, or my abiliy to have an extra dinner or two or four hours with my family, is worth well more than $200. I'm deeply sorry if your time with your friends and family is not. Never mind that WN is actually more expensive on the routes that I fly.

gooselee

Serious questions for OP.

Your posts seem to assume that all/most travelers are flying for leisure and have ample time to casually make their way to and through airports, with no real schedule to which they are bound. You may be able to miss a dinner, but I certainly cannot miss a meeting with the executive sponsors of my project. You also assume that all passengers should make their purchase decisions based on price alone.

1. Do you actually, or have you ever, regularly traveled for business?

2. Do you recognize that quite literally, there are many jobs and activities where every minute spent in transit equates to money lost, and that $50 or $100 differences in airfare are peanuts in comparison to the value of that time?

It seems that you are unable to grasp the demands of business travel and the fact that for many, many people, the value of time is immensely greater than even some of the most expensive last-minute airfares.

gooselee

Um...the Basic Economy fares are meant to directly compete with NK and F9. The Comfort+ is a version of unbundling services which are a page right out of the LCC book (which WN also does with Early Bird check in).

One might argue that such things, as much as we might dislike them, are actually increasing DL's market share and profits.

sethb

I wonder if you sleep in a bed, or just a sleeping bag on the floor. The bed would be massive waste.

By getting a seat with more legroom assigned, there's no risk of knee-jamming even if you aren't the first one to arrive at the airport.

Some people's time is worth money, hence flying isn't wasteful.

By taxi, 18 minutes without traffic.

LGA: 15 minutes without bags, 30 minutes with bags for check-in, per https://www.delta.com/content/www/en...uirements.html

Total of 189 minutes with checked bags, 174 without.

Taxi is 3 minutes without traffic, so 268 minutes.

79 or 94 minutes, depending on whether you're checking bags. And there are a lot of hotels within a couple of blocks of the Marriott Marquis.

Plus getting your car from wherever it's parked in NYC, could be another hour or two.

It didn't, flying did if you use the correct numbers.

Unless their time is worth money, which is true for some of us. When I'm getting $500/hour, I'm taking the fastest method I can.

All that "wasted time" still adds up to over an hour faster than the Acela. And there are shuttles every 30 minutes, so depending on your schedule the difference could be much larger.

For a value of "better" defined as "worse for me".

But you also claim the power to define what "benefits" other people, even when they disagree with you.

Ever hear the phrase "tyranny of the majority"? The big cities don't get to define the entire system.

It isn't anybody's goal (except yours) to move maximum passengers per hour. Airlines are in business to make money.

I can do stuff I like (reading, working, coding, watching, listening) while on a plane or a train. Not so much in a car.

sethb

So you don't care about airlines making money.

Especially to someone whose time isn't worth money.

Total inability to recover is a lot more damaging to someone whose time is valuable.

Someone who makes $2 million from him being there then.

Nobody except you cares about what you consider a "legitimate need". I consider what I want, and that's what I pay for.

Oh, so it's "more efficient" to give you what you want (for free, too, no doubt). But that's not part of WN's business plan, is it? I guess they don't agree with your version of "efficiency" either.

You don't get to define what I have a "legitimate need" for. You've never seen my spinal x-rays.

kettle1

This is 100% troll. OP does not know anything about the airline business. Trains, buses or cars, as well. Since WN is perfect, move this troll thread over to the WN FT area.

This started out about headroom on a 717, correct? Look at the title.

I can not believe people fall for this BS.

OP: Stick with WN - it works for you. It does not for me or my company 95% of the time and I am based at WN's second largest hub (LAS). WN works to RNO and California. That's it from LAS.

This takes the cake of a Troll thread. There is not one piece of wisdom placed here by the OP.

beachmouse

The problem with that is that not every tall person is qualified to sit in an exit row. They could be physically disabled. They could have difficulty understanding and speaking basic English language commands. They could have a need to be traveling with Biscuit the emotional support hamster, all things that are disqualifiers for sitting in an exit row.

A person just shouldn't have to choose between knees not hitting the seatback in front of them and being able to take their beloved Biscuit the emotional support hamster on their flight with them, you know?

RSSrsvp

This thread has gotten too off topic and I am shutting it down. Thanks to all for sharing their thoughts.

RSSrsvp - Moderator