Report Card: Major Airlines Flunk Customer Care
by Charlie Leocha
www.ConsumerTraveler.com
Kate Hanni’s FlyersRights.org issued their 2009 Real Air Travel consumer Report Card yesterday at the Press Club in Washington DC. If I came home with a report card like this when I was a kid, I’d get a spanking.
The 2009 report card for tarmac delays of more than three hours gave all of the major airlines a “F” for their performance. The major legacy airlines themselves — American, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways — were graded as failing; their grades were lower when they were combined with their codeshare regional airline partners.
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Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 2
[Read first » Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 1]
After his first departure from ATA, John Tague and two partners started The Pointe Group, an airline consulting firm with presence in both New York and suburban Washington, D.C. Tague’s only two consulting engagements as an ex-ATA executive were short, almost simultaneous, and quite unusual. At the request of a west coast investment bank, he became the consulting CEO for two ailing regional airlines: Air South, based in Columbia, South Carolina and, a few months later, Vanguard Airlines, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
It wasn’t clear to industry observers at the time how a single CEO was going to simultaneously nurse back to health two struggling airlines that were located 850 miles apart. One analyst, George Hamlin of Global Aviation Systems in Washington, D.C., likened the airlines’ plight to “two drunks staggering down the street trying to hold each other up.”
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BusinessWeek: How Delta Did Bankruptcy
by Dean Foust
BusinessWeek
Delta Air Lines (DAL) plunged into bankruptcy in September 2005, marking the culmination of more than a decade of management missteps made largely out of hubris. The Southeastern airline allowed itself to go through many of the stages of decline outlined in Jim Collins’ new book. Its sense of infallibility helped foster an undisciplined pursuit of practically every new jumbo jet that aircraft manufacturers rolled out, forcing it to fly large planes even on one-hour routes. Add to that a distinct denial of the increasingly grim realities of the airline business, exemplified by the errors made earlier this decade by then-Chief Executive Leo F. Mullin. He launched the trendy Song discount airline, which fizzled amid high costs and stiff competition from JetBlue Airways (JBLU). Worse, Mullin negotiated a 2001 labor deal that paid top pilots a record-shattering $300,000 a year. “Management always had to have the biggest and the best,” recalls a former exec. “It was the Delta way.”
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