Before We Start This Week…
United Airlines Gets Service-Aggressive
Last week’s Monday Insight outlined the need for airlines to respond to the new competition from other modes of communication.
We noted that the rules, systems and policies of the pre-China/CCP Covid era needed to evolve to make doing business easier for the customer due to inroads being made by electronic channels.
United has done just that. Big time.
Effective immediately, the airline has done away with change fees “for good.” For consumers, this is huge, not having to be in terror of calling reservations to change a flight, and hear the melodious message that another $200 bucks is gone. This is not a minor service move.
Aggressive. It makes flying United a lot less anxiety-prone, and anxiety simply makes consumers fear airlines.
Let’s see what the rest of the industry does. Southwest’s secret – no fees that actually increase customer loyalty and future business – is being discovered.
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The Enemy Is Now Official Misinformation,
Not Just The China/CCP Covid Disease
Durable goods orders up 11%. Housing starts at or near an all-time high. The stock market heading for records. Employment returning.
Yet air travel demand is going flat as a tortilla. American Airlines, for example, has announced that its October schedule will be just 55% of what it was a year ago.
Sumpthin’s not right here… with the economic rebound, air travel demand should be running apace. There is something that’s keeping people home.
It’s fear, where it should not exist. Artificial fear.
There’s a reason: the public is being fed lots of bad – sometimes intentionally bad – misinformation regarding the safety of air travel in the United States. Airliner cabins are being painted as potential disease bins, when just the opposite is true.
Say Thanks To The CDC. The latest attack on air service is a completely jive-time “report” by the CDC regarding the potential of being infected with the China/CCP Covid disease in an airplane cabin. We will be straight: what they put out is at least constructively, if not intentionally, a lie in regard to the safety of the U.S. air transportation industry. A lie.
Not that they went all out in regard to efforts. They “researched” two flights. Two. And not typical ones, either.
Then they came up with headlines that have helped destroy the rebound in air traffic in America. “Airline cabins can spread Covid…”
Bad Data. Bad Comparisons. Sloppy Reporting. Based on their “suspicions” – yup, suspicions – in analyzing people who were on these two – count them again, two – flights, the CDC has let loose the news that their hard work has discovered that this gift from the China CCP can be transmitted in the cabin of an airplane. Any airplane. Any circumstances. No full discussion.
That, then, has been taken by the media as the final word that flying on scheduled flights represents playing Russian roulette with your health.
Two flights. And worse, two flights back in March. And worse again, two flights that were charters specifically evacuating people who had been exposed to the China/Covid disease from an infected area in Italy, back to South Korea.
And like good little sheep we should accept their word, right? The media sure lapped it up.
Today, U.S. airports and airlines have implemented comprehensive and effective programs to sanitize facilities and aircraft. Therefore, those two flights the CDC “studied” are not germane to what is going on in the real world. Unfortunately, this context was left out of the story.
Wonder why they don’t go back and do an analysis of Noah’s Ark, too. Maybe the giraffes had symptoms. That would be just as irrelevant to today’s air transportation system as their dimbulb “study.”
This CDC report bears no relationship to the air transportation system at all. None. In that regard, the conclusion is a lie and one that has misled the American public.
One has to wonder what their motives really are.
Let’s hit it again, just to be clear: The CDC “study” was based on just two flights back in March, repatriating people from Covid-infected areas in the E.U. back to South Korea – charters specifically for that purpose, carrying that specific category of traveler. The passengers were all traveling specifically to escape from a region in which they had been exposed to the China/CCP disease.
That’s not the same as flights today between Sacramento and Seattle, or San Antonio to Atlanta. Totally different situations, different traffic sectors, and – critically – completely different measures now taken in regard to safe and sanitized air travel.
Creating A False Picture of Air Travel. After all of the effective work accomplished by airports and airlines in the USA, these incompetent clowns at the CDC have polluted the truth about air travel. And have directly caused people to lose their employment. We have to ask if they have some sort of political intentions with this type of dishonest slanting of the truth.
The fine hoodlums at the helm in Beijing who brought us this pandemic should be smiling broadly.
Just Because It’s From “Experts,” It’s Not Always Accurate. This is just another indication that we’re on our own in determining the truth.
Remember, the “experts” we were told to trust back when all this started (and as a separate sidebar for all the university professors out there who threaten students for telling the truth, it started in China) was the World Health Organization, which has now been proven to be a pack of political bozos. The rest of the “expert opinions” that come out from time to time must now be questioned and not taken at face value.
So, for those airports and communities that are being hurt by a slow rebound in air travel, be aware that a lot of it is an inside job due to entities like the CDC.
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