On the heels of the United Continental Holdings announcement that CLE will be 'de-hubbed' and face severe drops in service and employment news comes that UA has followed up with a letter to Cleveland residents thinking them for their tireless efforts (read: tax breaks) to keep UA and asking them to overlook the obvious and continue their end of the business relationship. As Seth, the Wandering Aramean blogs, there might be some financial incentives for CLE passengers to do just that.
I think it might be a bit premature to make any final judgment on this matter however as we'll need to see how the newly available slots are filled, by what airlines, and what the resulting effect on pricing (if any) will be. What I do think is that this announcement and the resulting UA spin is indicative of how the airline has chosen to conduct business with it's customers during the Jeff Smisek era.
Under Smisek, the company has shown a tendency to make drastic cuts, and then remind customers that they are still, through either some creative accounting, happenstance, or just due to their sluggishness in racing to the bottom, still the best option going. When UA devalued their miles chart the company line was that they still offered the most "saver" space of the major airlines, never mind that the definition of "saver" immediately changed to being something so expensive as to not be, and when UA announced service cuts at IAH they trumped (rightly so) that they still offered the most extensive route network from IAH for customers. When UA changed the pre-boarding process to effectively down-grade low-to-mid level Premiers they pumped up mileage bonuses and all but ignored that you're luggage allowance was pretty much now available to the general public as well.
In short, United's default reaction to any decrease in service is to immediately go into damage-control mode, and insult the customer's intelligence by demanding that things are still as they were, and that customer's should continue purchasing tickets from the "flyer-friendly" airline because.....well just because.
Loyalty, to United, is now a one-way street. Never mind that, as constructed, the loyalty business model was doomed to failure and, once miles became more about credit-card purchases than actual miles-flown, the entire bones of the "fly more to get more" programs were bound to collapse, the idea that pushing the overwhelming majority of your flying time to one airline was always going to go the way of the Dodo in the consolidated market. Gone is the "community" airline (Continental) that had a primary hub (IAH) and did it's best to ensure the hub was well-ran and as profitable as possible. What's in it's place is a global corporation (United) still with a primary hub (ORD) but whose main goal is now the high-end business traveler who, in most cases, is moving around on the company dime.
What remains for the majority of passengers (and I've said this many times before) is a white good, something to be purchased on price with little consideration for other factors. As the slim-line seats grow in popularity, even flying in cramped-comfort is going to require action on the part of the passenger. In the world of economy future, the most important flying decision you make is not who you fly, but what travel seat-cushion you purchase, where you by your in-flight meal at the airport and which carry-on luggage will allow you the most bang for your soon-to-be-feed buck.
Meanwhile, the airlines (while this post is centered on United I'm not singling them out) will continue to try and polish the turd that has become customer loyalty while taking away perks and benefits at the same time. I've said this before but I truly believe that "Complimentary Premier Upgrades (CPU's) are going to be the next "perk" purchased by the big banks to tack on to credit cards. As a low-to-mid level elite your flying future is soon to have its perk package reduced to nothing more than a mileage bonus that's going to be worth less and less every year.
All of this will occur while airlines such as United continue to remind you that they have more flights out of your home airport than anyone else, that they are hitting their 'on time metric' targets and that lost luggage complaints are way down. What they won't tell you is that many of these flights now have too-tight connections, that their metrics and on-time performance still lag the industry as a whole and their luggage performance is still sub-standard.
They'll also admit that the majority of the "flyer-friendly" baubles that they are promoting are for premium cabins only. If you're sitting in a slim-line seat in steerage, you can have 'Flier-Friendly' but it's going to come at ever-increasing prices.
