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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#141

Post by bdamm »

mehrdadn wrote: post #121
Scoundreller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cheap seats have very low margins, oftentimes negative… so it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service. An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. They can’t exactly fly just 189/233rds of the plane.

Are you imagining fuel usage is independent of aircraft occupancy?

It is. That is, the difference between a full airplane and an empty airplane in terms of fuel burn is quite marginal, maybe even less than 1% net fuel burn. This is because how heavily an airplane is loaded does not change its drag coefficient. A heavily loaded aircraft will not climb as quickly as a lightly loaded aircraft, but for the airliner, that just means it gets to cruise altitude a minute or two later than it otherwise would.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#142

Post by Scoundreller »

indecisive_user wrote: post #122
ubernostrum wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. As stated, you seem to be implying that selling a ticket for 1 cent is better than flying an empty seat. But that's not guaranteed to be true. If they put someone in that seat at a ticket cost of 1 cent, does it cost more than 1 extra cent in fuel to move the now-increased weight of the aircraft? If there's a free soda or something offered, does the extra one t…

>airlines routinely fly planes that aren't full, instead of going to extreme lengths to auction off ever-cheaper tickets in hopes of getting someone in every seat on every flight. Though I agree with your broader point, if airlines regularly auctioned off seats right before a flight it would encourage customers to wait until such time to make their ticket purchase. Even if the actioned seat still net them some profit…

I wonder why the last-minute-inventory auction model is so popular for hotels and not for flights.

I get that not every flight is equal, but nor are hotels, yet they have systems for blind comparisons.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#143

Post by babygoat »

kenneth wrote: post #138
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

You're giving up a 5%+ (minimum) return on your money spent by declining to participate. For me the return is closer to 20–30%. Declining to participate has a non-trivial opportunity cost.

It's not free to participate.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#144

Post by ubernostrum »

Scoundreller wrote: post #119
ubernostrum wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. As stated, you seem to be implying that selling a ticket for 1 cent is better than flying an empty seat. But that's not guaranteed to be true. If they put someone in that seat at a ticket cost of 1 cent, does it cost more than 1 extra cent in fuel to move the now-increased weight of the aircraft? If there's a free soda or something offered, does the extra one t…

I’m running on the assumption that an airline only ever sells a paid ticket for at least its operational costs of that extra pax. The 1 cent paid ticket simply doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist. But if the plane crashes, even the $2k last-minute 1st-class short-haul ticket will be a massive loss after all lawsuits are settled. If the marginal expense of a seat is $200, and you paid $1000, you may sit next to a discount fl…

Again: airline yield management is a deep and arcane art. We get glimpses of it through their public policies and pricing, and we can guess at some things through public financial statements that disclose or let us calculate their CASM/PRASM/etc.

But the moral of the story is it's not as simple as "selling the seat is always better".

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#145

Post by Scoundreller »

newnewpdro wrote: post #95
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

Did you think they weren't going to leverage your phone number in other ways when you furnished it for "improved security"?

Time to start spoofing my wealthier friend’s phone numbers.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#146

Post by kenneth »

skybrian wrote: post #87
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

I wonder about this. If they're giving you that level of service, aren't you paying too much? Who really wins here?

The programs are full of loopholes. So yes, business flyers paying on company dime are footing the bill, but the clever travel hacker can often get a great deal in the process.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#147

Post by kenneth »

technofiend wrote: post #134
arebop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: does anyone see these programs and think wow, this airline UX is so awful I want to show them my loyalty so that eventually they'll stop trying so hard to make me unhappy? I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, where this decision costs the shareholders a little b…

>I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, I suppose it depends on the business but at my Fortune 50 we're required to use "lowest logical airfare". You can force a choice of Southwest over United by choosing one airport over another, and there's enough wiggle room to let…

Not necessarily. Two round trip in economy to Asia in a year will get you bottom tier status. Quarterly trips in business (not uncommon if you work at some big company) would get you top-tier status.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#148

Post by hetspookjee »

da_chicken wrote: post #140
jklinger410 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they link my identity to my browser They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do. It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.

You know, I'm quickly reaching a point where I want the default browser to work in Incognito mode, and the browser should only switch to regular mode when I explicitly whitelist the domain.

On Android I browse by default with Firefox Focus and only to use sessions like posting this response I copy the URL to chrome and make the post. Than I'll go back to Focus. It's crude but Firefox Focus beats all browsers privacy and responsiveness on Android imo.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#149

Post by eisa01 »

shittyadmin wrote: post #67
eisa01 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read WSJ articles for 49 cents at Blendle, no need to bypass with Outline: https://blendle.com/i/wsj-com/on-hold-for-45-minutes-it-migh...

Yikes, that gives me some major sticker shock. I like where they're going, seems like they've got a lot of papers signed up which is great, but I was hoping for more of a subscription model which would allow me to read as I please rather than spending on a per-article basis. I'd have to be deeply interested in the content to pay that price. The way the movie and music industries largely beat piracy was by getting goo…

If you don't think the article is worth it, you can get a refund with one click at least. NY Times articles are 19 cents.

Yes, a subscription model would be useful. Blendle has that in the Netherlands to my knowledge.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#150

Post by Scoundreller »

totoglazer wrote: post #120
arebop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: does anyone see these programs and think wow, this airline UX is so awful I want to show them my loyalty so that eventually they'll stop trying so hard to make me unhappy? I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, where this decision costs the shareholders a little b…

That's literally the entire business model...

That and devaluation.

Don’t forget the “Air Canada” model of IPOing your frequent flyer program, nearly bankrupting it, and then buying it back for a fraction.

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