Who Needs Innovation?

Every airline in the US except Southwest, that’s who!!!

RIP Hub and Spoke

Take Continental, for example.  As I sit here at the gate in Austin (happily glowing in the aftermath of our first InnovationCamp) waiting for yet another delayed Continental flight (which might or might not be cancelled…Check back periodically for updates), I now realize that EVERY time I fly on an airline other than Southwest, the same thing happens.

A butterfly sneezes in Omaha, and a flight is delayed coming in from Bozeman.  This makes a flight crew headed for Chicago late, which means that that flight is delayed going to Beloit, which means that the entire hub and spoke system is scuppered for another day.  (Because you have to have 4 flight attendants to hand out Cokes, not three. One of whom is back in Bozeman)

One delayed flight here leads to another there.  This plane sits at its gate too long, so the gate-change merry-go round begins.  By 6pm, flights around the country are being cancelled, angry passengers are queued up, asking for hotel vouchers and a flight for tomorrow.

On the way from Manchester to Austin, I experienced massive delays and luggage sent on a different plane because of weather…in Atlanta.  That makes sense.  In Newark I complained about the Hube and Spoke system to a dude at the gate (Hey, even people in Alexandria, Louisiana want to go to Las Vegas), and he said that the system works just fine as long as there isn’t any bad weather…anywhere in the whole country!

That makes sense, since most days there isn’t any bad weather anywhere in North America. 

The other 364 days…a butterfly sneezes in Omaha, and that poor bloke trying to get from Atlanta to Orlando spends another night at the airport Hilton.

Happy Chapter 11

Today (notwithstanding the fuel hedge that Southwest was clever enough to negotiate several years ago, which will last till 2012), Southwest Airline’s market cap is bigger than the market cap of almost all of the other major carriers combined.  It has been profitable every year since its inception in 1973.  It runs a point-to-point operational system- they fly from one city to the next- and not through Alexandria on a prop plane…

Their innovation, in the early days, was operational.  It still is.  How and why the legacy carriers refuse/resist an embrace of a model that is proven to work is beyond me.  We should have invited them all to InnovationCamp.  We would have gladly bought there tickets (on Southwest).

Meanwhile, I watch as the time slips by, flights are cancelled, the queues grow, and more butterflies are born in Nebraska.

I think I’ll take a nap.

The Butcher