Airlines' Business Travel Problem

Writing by Sam Denby
Research by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

Select footage courtesy the AP Archive

[evan]

an airline-related video?
*grabs popcorn*

[FlavorWorld]

cant believe he finds so many airline-related topics 😭 at this point I'm pretty sure he'll never run out

[myhk]

Classic Wendover: A video about planes.

[harshdharpawar]

Wendover is secretly sabotaging all airlines to make his own WendovAir empire.

[otothej]

I booked a business trip yesterday for 1½ weeks from now. One thing that was odd about it was that the prices were not high at all. It was at very normal levels similarly if I had booked 2 months ago. Basically that means that the airlines desperately want at least SOME people to board their planes.

[PhilipTeltz]

That cut from Microsoft to All Gates didn’t go unnoticed here 😉

[chrisjoondeph]

Sam - I manage key business markets for one of the big 3 US carriers and you just perfectly described my job and the challenges we face right now. I’m going to share this with my friends/family so they know what I do for work now.

[zoltan]

Just the other day I was thinking, for a change, maybe Wendover should do a video about the aviation industry.

[YianniMacris]

If I ever start an airline, I'm hiring Wendover to make the decisions lol

[colonelcactus]

That Phoenix to Bozeman flight is exactly what my dad has been doing for his job for the past few months.

[HirokaAkita]

This is basically the old video "How airlines price flights"... but when everything went wrong.

[wojomojo]

It's incredible how Wendover does better airline videos than, say, a dedicated air travel channel like Simply Flying

[hammerth]

It's always funny to me how I've never been to LAX and yet can perfectly recognize it in stock footage because I have played GTA.

[ebob]

Unless your meeting is at or near the Memphis airport, you will likely be late to your 2:00 p.m. meeting if your flight is scheduled to arrive at 1:06 p.m. If my meeting was that important, I would fly out the day before. Also, departing Phoenix at 6:00 a.m. probably means getting to the airport by 4:00 which means waking up at some ungodly hour in the morning.

[yadisfhaddad]

I flew recently and I was harassed constantly by the airline with emails about upgrading to business class. I assumed the flight was empty, but instead, business was quite empty and coach was PACKED.

[staebs]

Should just rename the channel: Wendover Air Productions

[evandowdall]

At 1:40, you have 77% of people in white and 23% in red, even though the number says 67% (and subsequently 33% should be red)

[ManVsPixels]

Exactly the same story on the railway. I work for a train company in the UK. Although passenger numbers are getting back up, they are leisure travellers on cheap tickets. The commuters, the big money annual season ticket purchasers, are nowhere to be seen and revenue is still down because if that.

[davidjones]

Delta/American/United: Help we’re failing because of the lack of business travelers

SouthWest: Sorry, I forgot the part where that is my problem

[sarahb]

4:55 haha oh gosh. I used to work for southwest (corporate) so I had no choice but to only fly them for business.

Because of what you describe there, it usually meant unfairly long work weeks when traveling. so frustrating lol

unrelated: this is one of the most accurate and thorough yet concise explainers of airline business in general that I’ve ever seen. Nicely done thanks, I’m sharing this to our interns at other airline.