Comments on: Legacy carriers leave small airports, retreat to big business centers

By: Kevin Morgan

Kevin Morgan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:55:23 +0000

@Tim-
If your only choice vacation spots are outside the lower 48 states (ie Hawaii, Mexico, etc.) then yes, you may have trouble earning miles to go on such a trip. Your strategy of saving money on the airfare to apply to your vacations is a good one. Assuming some advance notice, you can fly on Southwest from Chicago to St. Louis and back for $49 each way. (That same price exists on AA, but you can be if Southwest wasn’t flying that route, it would be more like $150 each way or more.) That’s a less than 300-mile drive, certainly less than a 500 mile flight, so you’d get (at most) 500 miles each way on AA. Let’s assume you got another 250 miles per trip from your hotel and another 250 from your rental car, for a total of 1500 miles per business trip. At that pace, you’d have to fly 17 round trips to get 25,000 miles, the minimum needed for a free ticket for a domestic flight on AA. You’d have to fly 24 round trips to get 35,000 miles, the minimum needed for a round trip to Mexico or the Caribbean. And those are capacity-controlled seats, meaning if you want to go at a popular time, forget it – you’d need double that.

On the flip side, by paying the $49 each way SW fare, you’re saving probably $200 per flight over what you’d be paying if SW didn’t fly that route. After those same 17 round trips, you’d have $3,400 you didn’t have to pay AA to put toward your vacation. In addition, 17 round trips would have earned you at least 2 free round-trip tickets on Southwest. If you were saving for Mexico, the 23 round trips (plus one or two nights in a hotel giving Southwest credit) would give you three round trip domestic tickets plus would have saved you $4,600 towards your vacation.

Not a bad tradeoff at all, in my opinion.

By: erwing

erwing — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:54:07 +0000

airtran the best airline in us…..we need airtran service in chicago ohare…new nonstop to/from chicago ohare…thank you..erwing

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:55:53 +0000

Sounds like the legacy airlines are trying to make it harder for me to be a customer. The reason is this: when I fly, I collect the miles (so I usually stay with one airline and its partners). I then use these miles to go on vacation on the cheap.

Now, if my airline does not fly to where I need to go on business (say I am loyal to American Airlines and have to fly from Chicago to St. Louis), I will end up going with another airline to get the timing I need (and possibly the price). Yes, I get to work, but I do not collect miles on an airline that can take me to where I want to go on vacation.

I guess this means forget loyalty and fly who I can–and save money to go on vacation.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:39:57 +0000

also, what they’re doing is getting rid of unprofitable routes and tying up their balance sheets. That’s a good thing.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:00:38 +0000

However, I predict that once they get used to the better service and better prices from the non-legacy carriers and once the low-cost carriers flesh out their point-to-point schedules, the major airlines will have a hard time returning.
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Unless they BUY their competition.