(no subject)

[randomness]

Calling Beauvais–Tillé (BVA) a Paris airport is much like calling Manchester–Boston Regional (MHT) a Boston airport. It's clever marketing but not particularly accurate.

Claiming Châlons Vatry (XCR) as a Paris airport is just ridiculous.

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It's true, although the incentives are a bit messed up. When you fly on a low-fare airline, you bear the risk...for a failure of service by the airline.

This tends to encourage a race for the bottom in terms of service quality. Ryanair and Spirit seem to be the market leaders in that race.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

OTOH, the customer has a fairly good idea of the risk, because the airline can't escape its reputation. One way to look at it is the customers are differentiated in the money value of not getting there on time. If you're a law firm going to pitch a big client, or even a business sending a "professional", delay of a person costs several hundred dollars. If you're a tourist, it may be $100 or less. So "What would you pay to avoid a 5% chance of being delayed 1 day in arrival?" may be vastly different. So the optimal way to run an airline may be different for the two classes of customers.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

OTOH, the customer has a fairly good idea of the risk, because the airline can't escape its reputation.

Some do, some don't. I think in general business travelers, or the offices which arrange their travel, have a better idea than the average leisure traveler about airlines and their reputations. And airlines with bad reputations do put quite a lot of effort into obscuring that reputation. Occasionally they go so far as to change their names if the reputation is bad enough.

One way to look at it is the customers are differentiated in the money value of not getting there on time.

It is certainly true that customers are differentiated in the value of their time. However, I think even leisure travelers can incur significant costs if they encounter a problem. The key is that they seem to look at the up-front cost and ignore the risks. This is bad practice but leisure travelers generally don't have as much experience or interest in the ins and outs of travel: they're trying to get somewhere and would prefer not to spend much time or effort on the journey. This makes it easier for an airline (or really, anyone else) to take advantage of their inattention.

In general, my experience with business travel has been that businesses place a greater importance on the downside risks and are willing and able to pay more to minimize them. The other thing a leisure traveler can do which a business traveler often cannot is to build flexibility into their trip to mitigate the effect of problems.

In some ways the big network airlines already do this sort of differentiation when they break up their aircraft into different classes: the level of service one gets in first or second (business) class is in my experience much better than that in third (economy). The difference in-flight is only a part of the improved service.