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Honest question: How can we help companies here "playing by the rules" in a global field against (in your airport example) entities like heavily subsidized UAE
by existencebox 10y ago
Honest question: How can we help companies here "playing by the rules" in a global field against (in your airport example) entities like heavily subsidized UAE airlines, when they are essentially capped in some ways like this?
Now my "opinion" section WRT the above: If preventing consolidation and economies of scale forces airlines to other avenues such as sardine can planes, deceptive ticketing (economy levels that just take away things at the same price to push upselling), and govt protectionism (potentially exemplified by the laptop bans to some arab countries recently), is this the route we want to take? I don't have fantastic suggestions outside of "treat air as part of a US infrastructure which drastically needs govt. investment" so thus my question 1. (since I neither see my pipe-dream of infra commitment coming to pass, nor am completely sold on routing tax dollars to private corps, even if it would be an improvement on where they're being routed now. Perhaps build/maintain airports and infrastructure and be a "common carrier" of hardware that the companies simply rent? (I recognize states do this now, but I also know the level of infrastructure funding my state has available, and even intact roads are a fantasy.))
- neuralFatigue 10y agoSlightly tangential but, to your point about UAE airlines this is a good read to clear up some stuff coming from US airlines: Link: http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/03/22/campaign-against-gulf-carriers/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/03/22/campaign-a... I'll admit there is no perfect solution to issues like these. We mostly don't want government to pick winners or losers, but being completely free market based and no monopoly protections is great for companies since it is a race to the bottom line and they get to go to town on consumers with an array of fees in the airline context. I don't think preventing consolidation however results in any of those things that you mentioned, airlines are free to do what they want and what the market will let them. I'd recommend reading that article since I feel like we are not on the same page when we talk about 'playing by the rules' airlines. +1 on infra investment though.