The Business of Passenger Experience
Thus begins the death spiral of WOW Air.
Icelandair will no longer purchase its struggling neighbor after indicating it “unlikely that all of the conditions in the share purchase agreement would be fulfilled by the shareholders’ meeting on November 30th.” With WOW unable to sort out the conversion of its recently issued bonds and warrants into a form that Icelandair can purchase (for pennies on the dollar) the deal is off. This leaves very little chance of a positive outcome for WOW Air.
Can a collapsing operation still win awards? For WOW Air the answer is a resounding yes. The CAPA Low Cost Airline of the Year award was announced as the carrier shed 20% of its fleet amid a cash crunch and dropping utilization.
WOW Air is dead. Long live WOW Air. The Icelandic LCC is set to be purchased by hometown rival Icelandair at what can only be described as a fire sale price.
Does a merger integration still count as wildly successful if it hurts revenues to the tune of 1.5% for 9ish months? Alaska Airlines’ PSS integration came off incredibly smoothly on the operations side, but the carrier missed on the loyalty side. And lots of frequent flyers got a ton of award seats as a result.
Alaska Airlines is pulling the plug on Virgin America’s mid-continent hub at Dallas’s Love Field; routes to NYC’s LaGuardia and Wasington, DC’s Reagan National are being slashed later this year.
Getting beyond selling on price and schedule is a major hurdle for airlines. RouteHappy spent the past 7+ years developing the technology to bring comfort and service factors into the merchandising and shopping process. And now, thanks to the massive influence of ATPCO, these bits of data will be standardized across the industry. That’s a HUGE win for travelers.
Consolidation is coming in the cabin components industry with Astronics set to acquire Telefonix for $104mm in cash. The two companies product lines are largely complementary, covering in-seat power, passenger service units, seat actuators, inflight connectivity components and more.
The American Airlines 2014 numbers look pretty good, but the company’s view of the future is what I find interesting. Today’s earnings call held a few interesting nuggets. At least interesting to me.
When Southwest bought out AirTran they were quite up front about their desire to get rid of the 717s in their newly acquired fleet. Thanks to a new agreement between Delta and their pilot union, it seems like there is a deal on the table which will allow them to do precisely that. Assuming the […]
United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek has stated a few times that the company had some deficiencies in their in-flight product, bits that would be addressed as part of the merger process between United and Continental. The first of many bits detailed on that topic was the announcement that Economy Plus would be expanded to the […]
