JetBlue offers its airline passengers up to 36 channels of satellite TV at every one of its leather seats on aircraft that came off the production line no more than six years ago.
Delta’s Song airlines also sports leather seats and satellite TV, plus a jukebox of MP3 songs. Hungry? Song offers food that actually tastes good and a cocktail menu that includes the Song Cosmo and the Song Appletini.
Sound like a taxi without wheels? Hardly. So why does the business press insist on labeling these airlines “no-frills”? In the last two days, for example, the New York Times and Portland Oregonian called out Song and JetBlue, respectively, for their “no-frills” service.
This is a label that’s left over from a time when the legacy carriers (American, United, Continental, et al., also called “network carriers”) actually offered their customers something more than a frayed seat and a packet of stale goldfish crackers, and the few budget carriers that competed with them didn’t even offer the crackers. But the days of free meals and comfy pillows on those airlines are long gone. These days, the rule is bring your own peanuts — hell, bring your own water. The truth is, the more glamorous ride can often be found on the low-cost or low-fare carriers.
And — low-cost or low-fare — is what JetBlue, Song, and AirTran should be, and are often, called. “Low-cost” refers to an airline’s operating cost per mile per available seat. (See tables 8 and 9 in this Department of Transportation report). In the third quarter of 2004 the average cost per mile for the low-cost carriers was nearly five cents lower than for the network carriers (7.75 vs. 12.57).
“Low-fare” is also an appropriate characterization. The “low-fare” designation doesn’t mean there will always be dirt-cheap fares (although there often are) available to your favorite destination. But most of the low-cost airlines have a simplified fare structure that maxes out at a modest level — and they still throw in the frills.
As Jared Blank, a former travel analyst and editor of the Online Travel Review, wrote, “Low-fare carriers have been around since deregulation … Southwest has not been a life-threatening competitor to the majors because Southwest offered a budget product. JetBlue, Song and Frontier are not budget products. They are great products that cost less. This is called innovation, and it is a good thing.”
To be fair, top-of-the line amenities are not standard equipment on all of the low-cost and low-fare carriers. Southwest has no entertainment options — although it did recently add leather seats. And Midwest Airline’s saver service is a cattle car compared to its all-first-class standard service.
But it’s about time that press started noticing that not every low-cost startup deserves the “no-frills” label. Often, that description is more apt for the big network carriers lumbering their way to oblivion.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.