Alabama's Morning News with JT
Erin Real joins us to talk airlines
5280 Exterior's James Hardy sighting is a low-maintenance sighting made primarily of cement that resists flame spread and repels wood-borne insects and woodpeckers. Through the month of July, you'll receive free, rigid foam installation with the purchase of whole-house sighting. That's installing additional insulation behind your sighting, or free, but only for the month of July. Call today for more details or visit 5280exterior's.com. 5280exterior's.com, a James Hardy preferred contractor, 5280 Exterior's, the altitude of quality. Airline travel is up and airline profits are, well, they're not. Why is that? Let's talk with Aaron Rial. Aaron, why is it the airlines are not weeping, reaping the windfall of this travel? So you can see folks in a lot of other expenses that are eating into their profits, just like you said, this very strong travel deadline. Airlines are ramping up U.S. past it, so this has formed a lot of very big discount faders in off-peak periods. Simple supply and demand here. We know how this works. If you have more options, you're going to see more competition, and as a result, us as the consumer gets to benefit. We know that U.S. airlines have increased capacity. They're flying about 6% more seats this July than they were last July. They're also keeping airfarers in check, which is nice. Now, there are some winners and losers in this. If you look at Delta, they're one of the winners, and that's because they've really leaned into the premium seating, the business class, all of that, but then also Southwest, not doing terribly, but then the money losing carriers, the JetBlue, the Frontiers, they're changing their strategy. So JetBlue is taking a page from Delta. They are looking to have more premium seating, but Frontier and Spirit, they've actually done away with the change fees, which was very popular following the pandemic. And then the other add-ons, the seat assignment, things like that, they're bundling it all, which is what Southwest has always done. And people really appreciate that. What doesn't drive folks, nothing drives folks more nuts than getting to the check out and realizing they have about 300 bucks more of expenses for their ticket than the list priced. And that is always a problem when you're already on a budget on a trip, and then you have to, just to make it work, you have to pay more and more and more, Aaron. In these airlines, they redo these things to try and squeeze a few more dollars out of a consumer. Do we see any benefit of improved service, or I just like for them to have better snacks? Well, it depends on what you're flying. We know that JetBlue, again, they're moving out seats and putting in more mint seats, but they've also added more capacity of these airlines to these actual flights. So with that added capacity becomes less space in many circumstances, not like the plane got much bigger. So that can be an issue, but for the most part, they want to attract your dollars, and now that everyone is flying again and willing to go into debt to do it this summer, in fact, they really have more competition, and with that competition does come more perks. Now, is it directly correlated to snacks? It depends on the carrier, but they're offering pretty much the unbundling is what people really care about. They're willing to bring their own, whatever pretzels if it means that they don't have to deal with a three times the list price in terms of the actual ticket cost. And I miss when they used to fly unnecessary flights such that you would book a trip to someplace and there'd be like nine people on the trip. You could have, forget your own row, you could have your own section of the plane. Nowadays, every flight I've ever been on, they've got it worked out to a science. If there is an open seat, there might be an open seat, but I've never, I haven't seen in years where it's me and like three other people in the cabin. Yes. And that's because that is a massive loser for them. When that happens, like if you find yourself on a plane like that, that airline lost a tremendous amount of money and they are canceling those actual routes in many cases. They're just routes that aren't heavily traveled. They have no interest in providing a service for. And that's always a frustration for us here in Birmingham because most of the time when we want to take a flight from somewhere, we have to go through Atlanta. There's very few directs out of Birmingham. So we, I wish there were more, there were more direct, but I realized the problem is is there is just not enough volume of people going from Birmingham to say, you know, I don't know, Milwaukee to justify a direct flight. Exactly. Exactly. And as a result, it's when they're trying to make a profit at the airline executives looking at it and it's like if we're seeing an empty flight, we're dropping that flight, which leaves places like Birmingham and other, other secondary and tertiary cities in terms of travel out of, out of access to more locations. Aaron Rial, thank you so much for joining us this morning on Alabama's Morning News. Thank you. Have a good day. 5280 exteriors James Hardy sighting is a low maintenance sighting made primarily of cement that resist flame spread and repels woodborne insects and woodpeckers. Through the month of July, you'll receive free rigid foam installation with the purchase of whole house sighting. That's installing additional insulation behind your sighting for free, but only for the month of July. Call today for more details or visit 5280 exteriors.com, 5280 exteriors.com, a James Hardy preferred contractor, 5280 exteriors, the altitude of quality.