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Old May 30, 2019, 6:30 pm
  #31  
 
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Originally Posted by tmiw
Speaking of smaller city pairs, McClellan-Palomar Airport up in Carlsbad, CA has occasionally had passenger service, originally with United Express (EMB120 turboprops) and more recently California Pacific Airlnes (E135/145s). The latter airline only flew for a few months before folding, in fact. This despite there being enough population in the surrounding area that flights from there could theoretically capture a lot of passengers who would otherwise have flown out of SNA or SAN.

Anyway, the point is that it's going to take more than a supposed desire to "avoid big airports" for Moxy or some other similar competitor to succeed.
That airport rocked! Hertz would pull my car up near the entrance and leave the keys with the UAX GA for me if I was arriving after hours.
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Old May 30, 2019, 11:05 pm
  #32  
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Originally Posted by Badenoch
The minutes you save not going to a congested airport are spent on a congested highway getting to a remote aerodrome. Public transit isn't an option because the buses, trains and subways don't extend to rural cornfields. The money saved on parking is spent on gasoline driving to the hinterlands.
.
Moxy is considering MKE, BUR, OAK, ONT. These are not in the hinterlands but are major airports in their own right. Business and leisure travelers in the Los Angeles area, such as Sherman Oaks, Burbank, West Covina, and many other places will find BUR and ONT much closer than LAX.

Places, like Islip, is not convenient for Manhattan but there are businesses and population in Long Island. ISP would work well. Now, if you have business in Stony Brook, NY or Port Washington or Garden City or many other places, LGA is far away.

Originally Posted by OZFLYER86

below is from wikipedia
Wikipedia can be written by anyone. Some politicians and companies hire people to anonymously write for Wikipedia. Alaska Airlines has people doing so. That's why Horizon Air flights are listed as Alaska Airlines but United Express flights are listed separately from United. Sneaky!

Last edited by JY1024; Jun 11, 2019 at 9:05 am Reason: Merged consecutive posts
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Old Jun 1, 2019, 9:07 am
  #33  
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Originally Posted by Cloudship
I would not take the small airport thing as the ultimate strategy. Isn't this how JetBlue started?
Not really. JetBlue started at JFK from day one, leveraging the lulls in arrivals and departures / available bandwidth that existed 20 years ago, and opened by serving established NY airports like ROC, BUF, ALB, etc. to satisfy a tax-break deal with Chuck Schumer. JetBlue did not start trying to exploit underused secondary airports like SWF, LGB, ORH until a lot later.

Originally Posted by 84fiero
"Moxy" is just a working title for the airline - the actual name will be something else.
JetBlue's working title was "New Air" and they planned to name the working airline Taxi, and paint the planes like Checker cabs, until the FAA complained about the confusion that would create for airport ground controllers. After Taxi died, they consulted with Landor Associates and settled on True Blue, but that was the name of some customer-service project at Thrifty Rent-a-Car, and Neeleman couldn't clear it. (Obviously that roadblock didn't persist; True Blue became the B6 loyalty scheme.)

Finally a subordinate suggested JetBlue instead and it stuck (the name was not on the short list Landor charged them $100k to produce; Landor's other bright ideas were Scout Air, Hiway Air, Air Hop... aargh). Presumably Moxy will go through a similar process to find a real name, as the Moxy hip-hotel chain is pretty well established by now.

Originally Posted by OZFLYER86
flew peoplexpress in 1986 JFK/LAX on a 747. Think they started with some 727s but then went mostly 747.
No. PE never served JFK. They started from EWR with a handful of decrepit ex-Lufthansa 737-200s (the cabin signage was in English and German: AUSGANG, etc.) connecting northeast and Florida markets. The 727s came later. Later still they acquired a couple of ex-Braniff 747s for the Newark-Gatwick route.

By 1986 PeoplExpress was in a flailing death spiral. It began when they picked up a bunch more used 747s and challenged the legacy carriers with $99 EWR-LAX/SFO/etc. transcons. The guy who ran PE, Don Burr, paid no attention to 747 economics (his sole rationale for building a fleet of them, for use on domestic routes his senior competitors prudently gave up trying to make work with 747s back in the '70s, was that "people like to ride on 747s, don't they?"). Nor did he realize that while AA and UA might tolerate a handful of $29 PE flights on routes they did not care about, like EWR-PWM, they would go berserk and declare war against PE 747s challenging their bread-and-butter transcon business.

PeoplExpress lost a brutal fare war of attrition against giant legacies with deeper pockets, and that was that. But even at the height of its mismanagement, PE was never "mostly 747."

Originally Posted by OZFLYER86
...but moxy is using A220s to 2ndary airports, so United won't be able to compete, unless they get same aircraft.
The A220 isn't going to make or break Moxy at all from a customer-choice standpoint. Most of the infrequent discretionary flyers Moxy is chasing have no idea what plane they're booking.

The only aircraft type that is stuck in the big general public mind right now is the 737 Max; there's some evidence that even your half-aware Aunt Edith may make some effort to avoid booking the Max when it returns to service, and UA/AA/WN are going to have to deal with it -- claiming, lamely, the reprogrammed plane is safe while also allowing nervous people to book away from it. The A220 is apparently great (I haven't flown it yet) but enjoys no positive version of that kind of awareness / recall.
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Last edited by BearX220; Jun 1, 2019 at 9:14 am
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Old Jun 3, 2019, 1:09 am
  #34  
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Moxie will be about as disruptive as Frontier airlines has been to American, flying out of TTN instead of PHL. (Frontier even gave up and added flights from PHL.)
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Old Jun 3, 2019, 6:40 am
  #35  
 
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Originally Posted by javabytes
Moxie will be about as disruptive as Frontier airlines has been to American, flying out of TTN instead of PHL. (Frontier even gave up and added flights from PHL.)
I live in Trenton and won't even consider it for business travel. The flights don't go where I need and they're not frequent enough. I don't think our corporate travel booking portal will even allow us to book on Frontier (nor Spirit).

I think the addition of PHL killed off Frontier at ILG. ILG is much more accessible to a greater population than TTN but it's still too close to Philly. Neither one has public transportation connections into the city either.
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Old Jun 3, 2019, 7:43 am
  #36  
 
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Originally Posted by BearX220
Not really. JetBlue started at JFK from day one, leveraging the lulls in arrivals and departures / available bandwidth that existed 20 years ago, and opened by serving established NY airports like ROC, BUF, ALB, etc. to satisfy a tax-break deal with Chuck Schumer. JetBlue did not start trying to exploit underused secondary airports like SWF, LGB, ORH until a lot later.

JetBlue's working title was "New Air" and they planned to name the working airline Taxi, and paint the planes like Checker cabs, until the FAA complained about the confusion that would create for airport ground controllers. After Taxi died, they consulted with Landor Associates and settled on True Blue, but that was the name of some customer-service project at Thrifty Rent-a-Car, and Neeleman couldn't clear it. (Obviously that roadblock didn't persist; True Blue became the B6 loyalty scheme.)

Finally a subordinate suggested JetBlue instead and it stuck (the name was not on the short list Landor charged them $100k to produce; Landor's other bright ideas were Scout Air, Hiway Air, Air Hop... aargh). Presumably Moxy will go through a similar process to find a real name, as the Moxy hip-hotel chain is pretty well established by now.

No. PE never served JFK. They started from EWR with a handful of decrepit ex-Lufthansa 737-200s (the cabin signage was in English and German: AUSGANG, etc.) connecting northeast and Florida markets. The 727s came later. Later still they acquired a couple of ex-Braniff 747s for the Newark-Gatwick route.

By 1986 PeoplExpress was in a flailing death spiral. It began when they picked up a bunch more used 747s and challenged the legacy carriers with $99 EWR-LAX/SFO/etc. transcons. The guy who ran PE, Don Burr, paid no attention to 747 economics (his sole rationale for building a fleet of them, for use on domestic routes his senior competitors prudently gave up trying to make work with 747s back in the '70s, was that "people like to ride on 747s, don't they?"). Nor did he realize that while AA and UA might tolerate a handful of $29 PE flights on routes they did not care about, like EWR-PWM, they would go berserk and declare war against PE 747s challenging their bread-and-butter transcon business.

PeoplExpress lost a brutal fare war of attrition against giant legacies with deeper pockets, and that was that. But even at the height of its mismanagement, PE was never "mostly 747."



The A220 isn't going to make or break Moxy at all from a customer-choice standpoint. Most of the infrequent discretionary flyers Moxy is chasing have no idea what plane they're booking.

The only aircraft type that is stuck in the big general public mind right now is the 737 Max; there's some evidence that even your half-aware Aunt Edith may make some effort to avoid booking the Max when it returns to service, and UA/AA/WN are going to have to deal with it -- claiming, lamely, the reprogrammed plane is safe while also allowing nervous people to book away from it. The A220 is apparently great (I haven't flown it yet) but enjoys no positive version of that kind of awareness / recall.
Fascinating about the B6 name history! I can only imagine "Taxi" Those other chocies were so ridiculous too!

I never flew PE, but when I was a kid, one year for Christmas my parents gave me a VHS tape of 747 flights from inside the cockpit that were filmed on a PE 747. It was pretty cool at the time - not much to choose from in the days before YouTube!
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Old Jun 3, 2019, 9:54 am
  #37  
 
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Originally Posted by Toshbaf
Moxy is considering MKE, BUR, OAK, ONT. These are not in the hinterlands but are major airports in their own right. Business and leisure travelers in the Los Angeles area, such as Sherman Oaks, Burbank, West Covina, and many other places will find BUR and ONT much closer than LAX.
I'm a big ONT fan. Its the close-in airport for San Bernardino, Barstow, Palmdale, Victorville, Mojave Desert, Route 66, etc destinations.
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Old Jun 4, 2019, 6:53 am
  #38  
 
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Originally Posted by Peoriaman1
I'm a big ONT fan. Its the close-in airport for San Bernardino, Barstow, Palmdale, Victorville, Mojave Desert, Route 66, etc destinations.
I lived in Palmdale for two years. Never flew out of ONT nor do I know anyone that did. It was either BUR or LAX even with the traffic.
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Old Jun 4, 2019, 8:55 pm
  #39  
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Originally Posted by Bluehen1
I lived in Palmdale for two years. Never flew out of ONT nor do I know anyone that did. It was either BUR or LAX even with the traffic.
​​​I lived in Lancaster for three years, used ONT exactly once -- returning from a trip where I had caught a Space-Available flight out of Norton AFB (San Bernardino) and left my car there
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 12:31 pm
  #40  
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I like "secondary" airports when they're not faraway airports. Love Field is great for going to Dallas, Plano, Frisco, etc. Midway is great for going to downtown Chicago. But zero percent chance I'm going to Gary or Rockford unless there's a nonstop high-speed rail line to the Loop that I'm not aware of.

Yes, I'm aware that people actually *live* in Rockford and would love to fly Moxie, but that customer base isn't going to sustain the airline.

When I think of hub avoidance and smaller airports, and my willingness to pay a little bit more for them, it's to get nonstops between two reasonably-sized cities, not two rural airports that each require a substantial amount of surface travel.

Hubs are often a pain, but hubs also are more likely to have trains directly into the terminal and far more frequencies and destinations than smaller airports. It's a trade-off, but one that people in big cities are likely to continue to prefer over needing to drive themselves to a far-flung airfield.
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 3:52 pm
  #41  
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Originally Posted by BearX220
Nothing new in Kirby's remarks, at all. Strategic yield management / selective price-matching is how Bob Crandall at AA ran PeoplExpress out of business 35 years ago.

I think it's years too early to tell if Neeleman's new airline will have any impact on the market, let alone succeed. I do know that most travelers do not want to fly to a faraway secondary airport. If you're flying to Chicago, you want to land at ORD or MDW, not Rockford or Gary. If you're heading to London, you want LHR or in a pinch LGW, not Luton or Stansted or Southend. The idea that there's a huge cohort of travelers willing to drive / ride an additional 60 to 90 minutes to the middle of nowhere to avoid a big well-located airport is not borne out by actual market behavior, at least in the US.
who's talking about faraway 2ndary airports ? Who's says everyone going to London wants to go to bloody awful Heathrow. An A220 might be able to land at somewhere like London City. There are millions of people who don't live close to major airports. Doubt if Moxy is trying to drag people who live close to the DEN, ORD etc. to some 2ndary airport.

If I lived in Vail for example, I would much rather fly out of EGE (40 mins away, with no TSA queues whatsoever than crazy DEN, 2 hours drive away + long TSA queues). With all the stuffing around at DEN, there's probably a nearly 3 hour time differential in each direction. Plenty of people who live in Vail, aren't concerned about cost, but are concerned about convenience, as shown by existing flights into EGE, which are almost always much more expensive than flights to DEN, from eg. east & west coast.

Originally Posted by Plato90s
Those customers are low margins with higher levels of complaints since inexperienced travelers often have unrealistic expectations.
no not at all. There are plenty of sales reps who fly all over the countrry every week.

Last edited by JY1024; Jun 11, 2019 at 9:05 am Reason: Merged consecutive posts
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 4:00 pm
  #42  
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Ft Worth Meacham Field? LOL

DFW was built by order of the federal government because Dallas and Ft Worth could not agree on a regional airport (GSW, Greater Southwest International, was a failure). Part of the deal was that FTW and DAL would close to commercial aviation forever. The only reason DAL is still open is because of Southwest Airlines, which started service at just the right time where they were not required to move their operations to DFW like all the other airlines.

Initially DAL flights were limited to intra-Texas only, then a few years later, only the four states that border Texas. After many many years, federal law now allows flights from DAL to anywhere in the U.S.

There is zero chance of FTW getting commercial service IMHO. I would fly there just to add FTW to my airport list but sadly it just won't happen.
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 4:04 pm
  #43  
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Originally Posted by Badenoch
The minutes you save not going to a congested airport are spent on a congested highway getting to a remote aerodrome. Public transit isn't an option because the buses, trains and subways don't extend to rural cornfields. The money saved on parking is spent on gasoline driving to the hinterlands.

That nice lounge that frequent flyers can spend their time in is replaced by hard-backed plastic chairs in a waiting area where food and drink are dispensed by vending machines.

And if the weather gets bad or your plane breaks down you are stuck in a distant location with few options other than to sit in a spartan waiting room until the storm passes or the mechanics arrive.
yes but not talking minutes talking hours, maybe 3-4 hours on a day trip. Who says airport will be remote ? Some big cities have airports on "every street corner" many that an A220 might be able to get into that a B737/A320 can't. If you can drive up to gate 20 mins before departure, go through a very short TSA line & get on aircraft, that sure beats the hours wasted at big airports. They might have a small lounge, then again, who wants to sit in a lounge, most people just want to get where they're going.

Originally Posted by Bluehen1
I live in Trenton and won't even consider it for business travel. The flights don't go where I need and they're not frequent enough. I don't think our corporate travel booking portal will even allow us to book on Frontier (nor Spirit).

I think the addition of PHL killed off Frontier at ILG. ILG is much more accessible to a greater population than TTN but it's still too close to Philly. Neither one has public transportation connections into the city either.
no idea where Trenton is (New Jersey ?) The current flights don't go where you want to go. Moxy is not going to be anything like Frontier or Spirit & more like Jetblue.

If Moxy flew from Trenton to some small LA airport 8 times a day, you would use it, if you had to go to LA.

Many Trenton doesn't have enough people, but there are plenty of americans, who don't live beside some big ugly airport & want to go to other cities, not necessarily to somewhere near their big airports.

Originally Posted by strickerj
Interesting idea; I hadn’t heard of them, so thanks for sharing. I’m not sure why the OP here seems to be such a cheerleader for Moxy (isn’t that also a Marriott hotel brand?), but we do need more competition here in the wake of the industry consolidation. The focus on smaller secondary airports with lower fees makes it sound like America’s version of Ryanair. We’ll see how it works out.
Ryanair ? Don't think so. Many here don't seem to get it.

Big hubs have massive delays. Delays mean very inefficient use of aircraft, waiting around in long queues just to take off. I think Moxy will have 1 massive advantage over the big boys. Super efficient new aircraft, with fast turns at less congested airports. Rather than do an Allegiant & fly some 1 horse town to Vegas twice a week, think when Moxy start a route, they will fly it many times a day, say 6-8 times a day minimum, then when that route works, they'll start another 6-8 times a day.

The big boys don't want anymore bases in big cities.

Last edited by JY1024; Jun 11, 2019 at 9:06 am Reason: Merged consecutive posts - please use multi quote feature!
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 4:18 pm
  #44  
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Is the OP a mouthpiece for Moxy? Every single post is defending their business plan no matter how ridiculous.
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Old Jun 6, 2019, 4:38 pm
  #45  
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Originally Posted by Kevin AA
Is the OP a mouthpiece for Moxy? Every single post is defending their business plan no matter how ridiculous.
nothing ridiculous about Moxy.

Big airports in Australia are just like the congested mess at big hubs in USA.

Think Moxy has nailed their niche market & big boys can't compete. It's not just about price.

If eg. you wanted to fly BNE/PER tomorrow, which FYI is about 2240 miles, 15 miles further than LAS/JFK or LAX/JFK at 2436 miles (or less than 10% further than BNE/PER) , you're probably going to have to pay close to AUD$1000 (USD$700). Similarly for a LAX/JFK tomorrow, you're probably going to pay more than USD$700 one way on one of the big boys. Companies with offices near the airports Moxy will fly to, will be targeted & offered fares which won't be LCC type fares, but will be better than big boys last minute fares (& to use big boys, that companys flyers might have to make a trek to big ugly hub, with all it's delays) It's a no brainer & can't believe many of here can't see it.

Gee I could go to a big ugly hub airport miles away, park in some distant car park, wait for a shuttle bus, to then get in a big queue for TSA & finally get to my flight gate, only to be delayed for take out & do same on way home, that day or whenever, or go to my local smaller airport & get 3-4 hours more sleep. Ding !!!!

This is exactly where Moxy can be a lot cheaper, not competing at bottom end against the LCCs & ULCCs.

Originally Posted by COSPILOT

That airport rocked! Hertz would pull my car up near the entrance and leave the keys with the UAX GA for me if I was arriving after hours.
say a Moxy A220 can get in & out of Carlsbad, wherever that is & start with flying to 2 or 3 destinations, on a relatively high frequency basis, with a small lounge, they would kill it, as soon as people realised that they could save so much time & stress. Do surf air fly to Carlsbad ?

Originally Posted by LondonElite
Of course the airlines get it!
I think the big boys, is like an episode from DUMBER & DUMBER 3.

In USA why offer basic loss leader fares to try to compete with LCC's ?

Do they really want to be a hybrid LCC/full service carrier The big boys don't want another base in a big city to spread themselves out even more.

Having 1 aircraft type is very efficient use of resources & esp the A220. A route they might start with 4, 6 or 8 flights a day (8 a day is probably less than 1 every 90 mins) they could increase. They can't fly everywhere & they won't, but where they do, they suit a lot of people & not talking those who are financially challenged.

The more I read here, the more I realise Moxy will work & the big boys will leave them alone. The big boys can only compete on price from those big ugly shopping centres(sorry airports) Many business types aren't going to use those cheap & nasty basic economy fares or LCCs.

Last edited by JY1024; Jun 11, 2019 at 9:19 am Reason: Merged consecutive posts - PLEASE use multi quote feature
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