Food, glorious food. Great stuff, but it's not what airlines are about. It's a minute part of an airline's overall spending, and saving on food and beverage is at best a nice exercise on the margins. Consider United Airlines' now infamous food fiasco, in which the world's second-largest carrier grabbed the attention of much of the world's press and many of its frequent flyers by reversing its decision to start charging for food on transatlantic flights.
Charging for food is nothing new to Europe's budget flyers or to the coach classes of North America. But United, which has lost more than $3 billion so far this year, was all set to become the first "regular" airline to charge for food on international flights, between Europe and its Washington Dulles hub.
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The plan, when announced in mid-August, brought howls of ridicule from many and anguished cries from others. Henry Harteveldt, the Forrester Research senior analyst, said he'd heard protests from United's corporate customers within hours of the food-service memo hitting the streets. He remarked: "There's just something schizophrenic about United's management."
United reversed itself a day or two before the planned 3 September date to implement the changes. The occasion is a rarity, mostly for the scarcity of any airline's decision to reverse a decision.
But beyond the rejoicing over the reversal, the entire issue raises the question: is United that desperate? Does it believe it can return to profitability through cuts that at very best would save a few hundred thousand dollars a year? Or, more importantly for an airline that has just launched a multimillion-dollar hi-tech advertising campaign and is about to begin another PR campaign about how it made those ads, is United that tone deaf?
The airline's pilots certainly think so, and in a gleeful, gloating statement after it reversed itself, decreed that United's chairman and chief executive, Glenn Tilton, was "out of touch with customers". This is perhaps further evidence that United is indeed out of touch: who or what else could have given such a quick and easy victory to a group as ready and as eager to pounce as the airline's most militant labour union?
United said it moved to make the change only after polling and surveying and looking at feedback. It also says it reversed itself because of customer feedback ("You spoke. We listened."). But it needed to check with consultants to gauge how people would react to something like this? Tone-deaf, indeed.
Source: Flight International
