Pay Per Pound: Produce… Meat… Airfare?
The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News recently ran ads for a “new airline” called Derrie-Air which supposedly charges passengers by the pound. But this new carrier will never actually take flight because it was simply a one-day advertising campaign by Philadelphia Media Holdings, the papers’ owner.. The goal was to “demonstrate the power of our brands in generating awareness and generating traffic for our advertisers, and put a smile on people’s faces” says Philadelphia Media Holdings spokesman Jay Devine. If you visit the website you’ll read that Derrie-Air is the “world’s first carbon-neutral luxury airline” and see sample rates that range from $1.40 a pound for flights from Philly to Chicago to $2.25 a pound for flights from Philly to LA. The company tracked traffic to the Derrie-Air site (http://www.flyderrie-air.com) and noted that the website drew a much higher-than-usual response rate (1.25% click-through rate compared to a national click-through of 0.05%!)
It was an interesting experiment for sure, but of course the lack of full disclosure on most of the ads has prompted concern for several journalism veterans who claim it is “clearly deception” and that “newspapers should not be in the business of deception.” Honestly, though, how else could the company conduct market research in terms of understand how advertising is going to work in this era. Plus the ads were so far-fetched that’s it hard to imagine that anyone would take them seriously. And if that wasn’t enough, the name of the airline (which means booty/back-end in French) should have given it away!
^haha
This reminds me of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast that aired over the CBS radio network on Halloween in 1938 and terrified citizens across the country. The news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures but it did bring fame to Welles (the director). In the same way, this has brought more attention to the worsening plight of airlines.
The difference: an airline that charges per pound is much more foreseeable in the near future than an alien attack!
…Which brings me to my main point…
I’m sympathetic to the airlines’ troubles but treating customers like freight and taking away service elements is certainly not going to help. Desperate times call for desperate measures- but the focus should be on innovations that can help airlines greatly lower their operating expenses, not on finding ways to cut corners. Some airlines have found commendable simple fixes for the time being. For example, Japan Airlines Corporation is using crockery in their cabins, which is 20% lighter than the service items they replaced, and Southwest Airlines is flying slower (cutting just 72 seconds on a Houston to LA flight can save them 8.7 gallons of fuel for each of the airline’s four daily non-stops!). This is definitely scalable in the short run. But really, what we need are large scale, sustainable solutions. In the 70s Brazil responded to the OPEC oil embargo by launching a national program to create a viable alternative to gasoline by using the nation’s sugarcane industry to produce enough ethanol to meet its economic needs. Wall Street laughed then- but who’s laughing now?
Basically, instead of trying to solve America’s obesity problem, airlines need concentrate on technology, efficiency, and sustainability…the pressure is on.
