Legs, more or less

Economy, plus 10%? United Airlines, in retrospect, may have done something very smart. Back in the late 1990s, United said it would separate as much as one-third of its regular coach seats by as much as five inches more, dub it Economy Plus and set an additional fee on a sliding scale over regular coach fares. The carrier has never promoted Economy Plus heavily, but it it may be on to something.
Evidence of that comes from seatguru.com, the on-line service that just completed a survey that found its members would pay as much as 10% more for a little extra legroom. Some 42% of seatguru.com readers would pay for about five inches of added legroom. The same seatguru.com readers said that JetBlue has the best economy seats. That leads to the question, do they know that a chunk of JetBlue seats (in rows 11 through 25 in the all-coach cabin) just happens to have as much as five extra inches? And the carrier charges extra for only some of these seats?
(Illustration from United's website section on Economy Plus.)

Southwest's On. Or Off, by a Little.

On and Off. Southwest Airlines is trying a new tagline - "Grab Your Bag. It's On" - as part of an ad campaign to persuade us to... well we're not sure. With some upbeat music and the repeated slogan of "It's On," the ads seem to be saying 'get back out there, keep flying.' The spots are a little bit jerky, a little bit jarring, bouncing from one intense, upbeat image to another, with people driving baggage carts and tossing bags and tearing tickets, all very quickly. The spots end with a narrator saying: "We don't fly around tough times. How about you?" But it's not always the narrator who invokes the slogan: in one spot, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly, sitting in an aisle seat, looks at the camera and says it in his deadpan (if not semi-catatonic) tone.
David Crawford, creative director of the Dallas based agency GSD&M, tells an advertising journal, Mediapost.com, "At some point, we all come to the place where we say: 'You know, OK, enough is enough - let's get on with it, pull up our boot straps, get back at it. We've got to fix this ourselves.' And that's basically what this campaign is about: OK, grab your bags, it's on, we're done. Let's get back at it."

The ads replace a long Southwest campaign that poked fun at other carriers for charging fees for checked bags. This has led some to speculate that the Love Field-based carrier will soon start imposing a fee to check a bag. We don't think so, but we do think that the spots are really a little unfocused and a little herky-jerky. On the other hand, if they work...

Feetalk: Airfield on NPR

He can still talk..and talk. National Public Radio has been very, very good to Airfield, and their Morning Edition had him on the air again the other day. We talked about fees and more fees, including the proposed new surcharge on bags checked while at the airport rather than from home. And NPR's host, David Green, asked about the curiously refreshing Evolution of Security blog posted by the Transportation Security Administration. You can listen by clicking here.

All quiet at the check-in counter: is anyone there?

Is this the next step toward charging flyers to talk to a human being when they check in at the airport? Not that that's such an outlandish possibility; Ireland's Ryanair has spoken about eliminating check-in personnel from the airport entirely as they drive passengers to the web for more and more functions; even South Florida-based Spirit Air has mulled the unstaffed airport.
Now the two 'U's, United and US Airways, say they want you to pay those checked-bag fees at home when you check in for your flight on-line and print out your boarding pass. If you tell the carrier from home that you'll be checking a bag - $15 for a first bag and $25 for a second bag - it will cost $5 less than if you just bring the bags to the airport and pay the fees there. Or in other words, it will cost you $5 more, $20 and $30 respectively, to do the airport thing.
When you do it on the web, the airline's people spend less time on you, goes the argument. But take the premise to its logical conclusion: the more passengers do from home, the fewer airport people are needed. And when you get people doing pretty much everything from their home PC, how many people does an airline need behind the counters? And will people eventually pay to talk to them?