Public transit is an interesting concept, and as I’ve written about before, is not a panacea.
However, I’m wondering if it might be reasonable to apply the concept to flying. Bear with me a minute here.
Let’s say you fly – maybe a lot, maybe not a lot, but when you do, you pretty much go to the same places. Airlines have frequent flyer programs. Why not have frequent flyer cards upon which you not only earned miles, but also could buy flight segments? For example, let’s say I fly a lot between a given pair of cities (maybe Raleigh and Baltimore). A company like Southwest could sell me en masse a bunch of flight segments (good for any segment they fly from any city to any other), and I could redeem them for actual trips.
Taking my example, let’s say I fly a lot between Raleigh and Baltimore. Instead of paying $50 each way (or whatever the current price is) – I could buy 10 flight segments for, say $475. All taxes and fees included already. Then, if i need to fly to Albany for some reason, instead of redeeming 1 flight segment each way, I cash-in two each way, and voila: I have a round trip from Raleigh to Albany.
By selling flight segments in batches, Southwest could guarantee passengers (or at least revenue). The drawback, of course, is that you can only redeem segments for flights that have open seats left.
What do you think about this?
The airlines have far too much invested in their current business model of “shaft business travelers” and being able to dynamically change the ticket costs at a whim. I have a feeling this kind of system would lose them money, which they’re obviously not keen on.
If such a system was put into practice, I think the airlines would play their usual games of pricing restrictions. Given that, it’d basically be for most people effectively paying in advance for a bunch of flights they can only use under special circumstances, etc. That amounts to tying up a bunch of money in some non-refundable ticket vouchers, which isn’t a popular concept for most people.
I agree – airlines do have a lot vested in their current system, and this would be a sea change.
Perhaps a different airline would start doing something like this. Aloha Airlines, for example, has all their flights at the same cost island to island… and if you miss the one you’re scheduled on, you can go on the next (which runs pretty frequently).
I agree, The interesting thing to see is whether the Airlines would add some sort of expiration to them to ‘encourage’ people to use them or lose them as seen with coupons of most any sort. I like the ideas put in place by Aloha Air, it creates the ability to travel as it really should be.
I’ve done some thinking on how to implement this, and I think I’ll post again on it soon.