The Rise of the Low-Cost Airline: A Threat to Legacy Carriers?

Recently, the latest brainchild of the Virgin conglomerate known as Virgin America began its debut service. Currently, Virgin America is based out of San Francisco's airport, and offers service to places including Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington D.C. Virgin America also claims to have rates much lower then the airfare of other, more well-known US Carriers. Please know that I am not attempting to advertise Virgin America in any way. Rather, I'm using them as a way to inform you about how airlines such as Jetblue, Frontier and Southwest, alongside Virgin America, are each providing lower costs and better service then many of the famed Legacy Carriers: American, Delta, United, US Airways, and the many US Airlines that follow the Legacy Carrier way.

It began on September 11^th. Everything changed after that. With all the new security regulations, insane TSA agents, and other issues, Legacy carriers starting making tons of sacrifices, valuing efficiency over comfort. Flying on any US airline literally felt like flying on a massive bus.

Over the last few years, the Legacy Carriers have taken a turn for the worst in several areas, such as Customer Service, Scheduling, as well as conditions of flying in the tin cans. United in particular has a website created by people against the airline dedicated to exposing the problems within the corporation. Many passengers often complain that they are compared to cattle when flying in one of their airlines. In fact, US Airways just recently canceled 530 flights out of their hub in Philadelphia, leaving one group of travelers stranded on a plane with an overflowing toilet. Airlines: They just ain't what they used to be.

The Rise of the Low-Cost Carrier

In the last 30 years, there has been a rise to a new type of airline: One that offered low-cost airfare in exchange for the sacrifice of what people deemed were services part of the regular Legacy Carrier. These airlines were the Low-Cost Carriers. One of the first, which still exists today, was non other then Southwest Airlines. Southwest is your typical low-cost service, offering very little other then passage to where it is you're supposed to be going. Still, the service is far friendlier then other airlines, and most people often say they have quite a good time on SWA flights. At the time, service on the legacy carriers was relatively decent, so low-cost carriers often got blasted by the more "established" Legacies.

At the beginning of the millennium, a new form of low-cost carrier began to appear. This form threatens Legacy Carriers far more then the older variant. New airlines that were low-cost, but provided things that even the regular airlines didn't have! Jetblue was among the first of these. Jetblue Airways offered leather seats, DirecTV, XM Satellite Radio, all from one's own seat. Some Legacy Carriers don't even offer that for their First-Class passengers! Now, with Virgin America entering the fray, which offers music, movies, even the video game classic Doom, Legacy Carriers have quite a few things to worry about.

In order to survive, Legacy Carriers must adapt.

In order for the Legacy Carriers to survive, they need to look and see what the new carriers are doing. Yes, the new carriers screw up like the old ones, such as Jetblue's tarmac incidents, but unlike Legacy Carriers, which simply dismiss it with a voucher at max, Jetblue will go as far as to apologize for the delays on sites like Youtube, and place policies to compensate those stranded on the tarmac.

American Airlines has taken a small baby step: It is considering installing Wi-Fi in some of its planes. Unfortunately, it's going to take much more to fight against the low-cost carriers then simply putting in Wi-Fi. The Legacy Carriers need to come down to our level and realize that people simply do not want to be treated like animals heading to the stockade. You'd think that they would realize this, but not realizing it will ultimately lead to their downfall. If any low-cost carrier gets a major international route, it may just seal the fate of the Big Six: Northwest, Delta, American, US Airways, United, and Continental, all falling at the hands of those that realize that passengers are human beings, and not just profit margins.