Alex Hopmann’s Blog

My buddy Eric Berman writes about how badly the major airlines have screwed up their recent pricing changes where they charge for checked bags and nickel and dime you on every bit. For what its worth Eric is a former exec at Expedia which I think qualifies him as an expert on aspects of the travel industry. The main point is that there were totally different ways to position this- “we aren’t going to charge you for stuff you might not use”. They sort of successfully did that with most of the changes in in-flight meals. Considering how bad they were I haven’t minded that they don’t provide them anymore as long as I can bring my own food on. What scares me about the checked baggage thing is that the result will be even more people competing for the limited overhead space, and many of them will be infrequent travelers with huge over-packed bags. This could easily turn into a mess with 15 minutes of extra boarding time which would quickly cost the airlines more than they are saving in the first place.

Meanwhile Signal vs. Noise writes about how Alaska Airlines did some smart research to redesign the check in area in Seattle with a projected savings of $8 million this year. Alaska has actually been doing this kind of thing for years- a very long time ago they were one of the first to put kiosks in the Seattle airport. Back then I was flying them a lot and it was great to walk from the parking garage and be able to hit the kiosk right away (before you got up to the full mess of the check-in area) and it would print out your boarding pass with the gate # right there. No milling around looking for the right place and the frequent Alaska travelers got to skip the whole mess.

Its things like this (as well as my recent experiences flying from Washington DC back to Seattle) that put Alaska Airlines in the “new airline” camp. They may have been around for 80 years or so but mostly they still behave more like Southwest and JetBlue than like an old-school airline (American, United, etc…)