Race to the Bottom

For some time now I’ve been watching as the airline industry indulges in a variety of new revenue-enhancing strategies – which means slapping extra fees on anything that doesn’t get up and walk away first, for the most part. With the advent of online travel sites, and their inevitable side-by-side fare comparisons functions, it isn’t possible to randomly apply higher fares without everyone in the world with Internet access knowing about it, so the airlines have started looking for other charges they can tack onto your bill to raise the amount they will make on your ticket. Which has led to some remarkably silly and counter-productive ideas, like checked bag fees, pillow and blanket fees, onboard food you have to purchase, and so on. But the latest scheme, from regional carrier Spirit Airlines, has to be the worst yet: they are now going to start charging for carry-on bags…

According to this story in USA Today, Spirit is going to be charging $45 to check a bag into the overhead bins – although this is lowered to $30 if you pay for it in advance (when purchasing your ticket, for example), and can be lowered to $20 if you join their still mysterious “$9 Fare Club” and agree to receive several dozen pieces of junk mail (and junk e-mail) each week for the rest of your life. Details of how much it will cost to join the “Club” or whether this will end up being a mileage-based perk instead are still not available. Essentially, if you purchased the right to carry on a bag you will also be allowed to board the plane first using a special boarding pass; if you didn’t, you will be stopped at the gate and required to pay the (much higher) bag fee on the spot. No one has explained how the airline plans to deal with the delays of running what amounts to a checkout lane before you get on the airplane, or what they propose to do with the luggage of people who won’t pay…

As a means of wringing money out of people who are (so far) refusing to pay to check their bags, I think it’s a remarkably silly concept, and I’d probably take a few moments here to mock them for it, but fortunately I don’t have to, because Jet Blue airlines has already done it for me. You can check out their web page about the competition’s new fee here, if you want to and I actually hope you do, because it’s hysterical – Jet Blue is advertising a carry-on bag that you wear like a shirt (or perhaps a shirt with the capacity of a carry-on suitcase) that you can wear when you’re not flying Jet Blue. It also ties nicely into Jet Blue’s positioning themselves as having the most comfort and the most leg-room of any major airline…

So can Spirit really make enough money on this stunt to make up for the fact that they’re annoying their customers, slowing down the boarding process, driving people away from using their service, and giving the competition the opportunity to not only outperform them but also mock them into the bargain? Only time will tell. And, I suppose, we must acknowledge that someday, someone might even come up with an even worse idea for an incremental increase in revenue from their business. But by the same token, we should all remember that this is how the policy of charging for checked bags got started – and that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon…