Korean Job Discussion Forums

[regicide]

There is an article by Charles Wheelan, Phd about the airlines that is interesting. I have copied the part about fees and made a shorter link with tinyurl for the whole article. I have always hated those fees with a passion and always thought it was kind of a punitive fee for being so disorganized for not noing your schedule a year in advance.

http://tinyurl.com/2as63x




Money for Nothing

3. Does it really make sense in the long run to charge us something for nothing?

Imagine that you've checked into a hotel at a very reasonable, even cheap rate. Further, suppose that by some act of your own stupidity, you lock yourself out of your room. And then, when you present your ID to the front desk, you're informed that there will be a $100 charge for a new key -- nearly as much as the room cost in the first place.

This is a brilliant move by the hotel in the short run. Your possessions are locked inside the room. They've squeezed $100 of incremental revenue out of a plastic replacement key that probably costs five cents or less.

But it's idiocy in the long run -- or so it strikes me. People don't like to pay $100 for something that costs nothing. They feel angry and taken advantage of.

And yet that kind of thing seems to be standard operating procedure for America's traditional airlines. I paid $100 twice in the past week to change a flight from Chicago to Orange County, Calif.; in both cases I was changing my reservation to a flight that had open seats at the same fare.

This should have been a costless transaction. It doesn't cost American Airlines anything to move me from the 1 o'clock flight to the 3 o'clock one. When I paid the $100 change fee (twice) -- admittedly because of my own poor planning on both occasions -- I felt like the guy being charged $100 to get back into his hotel room.

I've been thinking ever since: How could this possibly be good business, especially as I see the new ads from Southwest (one of the post-deregulation carriers willing to break the mold) now advertising how easy it is to change flights without a fee?