Coloradans watching Sunday’s Super Bowl recreation will see a quick replay of the air journey meltdown that wreaked havoc at Denver International Airport and throughout a lot of the nation round Christmas.
United Airlines, DIA’s No. 1 service, is utilizing the 30-second spot to spotlight its efficiency in a approach that takes a delicate dig at its No. 2 rival in Denver, with out naming Southwest Airlines.
For a full week throughout one of many 12 months’s busiest journey durations, Southwest canceled tons of of flights a day into and out of DIA, typically greater than half its day by day schedule. For most of that interval, United had a relative handful of cancellations, at the very least on its mainline flights.
The United advert reveals video of an unidentified household from Denver gathering collectively, and the on-screen textual content says: “United got more families in and out of Denver this holiday than any other airline. Despite the weather.”
United says the advert will air as soon as every within the Denver and Colorado Springs TV markets throughout Sunday’s NFL championship recreation between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. A spokesman declined to say how a lot the airline paid for the spots, however they had been amongst Super Bowl advert slots bought in 5 U.S. markets late final 12 months with the intention of airing a extra generic United advert.
United opted to customise the Colorado adverts, seizing on December’s journey woes by a serious competitor.
While most massive airways had been affected by a sub-zero winter storm that hit Denver and far of the nation within the days earlier than Christmas, lots of them started to get better shortly, together with United. But Southwest ended up canceling 15,000 flights nationally because it struggled to revive an outdated flight crew scheduling system and overcome different operational failures — leading to a public relations catastrophe that has price Southwest greater than $1 billion.
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During a media name Tuesday, Josh Earnest, a United senior vice chairman and its chief communications officer, and Matt Miller, vice chairman of United’s Denver hub, pointed to system upgrades, a pandemic hiring spree and measures United has put in place, together with backup staffing and spare plane, to make it extra resilient throughout unhealthy winter climate.
“It’s not just about our biggest competitor here in Denver — it’s about a handful of airlines, the so-called low-cost carriers, that have chosen to not make these kinds of investments that do have a disproportionate impact on their operational performance and on the setbacks that their customers have to endure,” Earnest mentioned.
Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz mentioned Tuesday that it was not possible to touch upon United’s advert with out seeing it, however he wrote in an e-mail: “I’ll just offer that Southwest has demonstrated a 51-year history of serving customers well by operating one of the world’s most admired airlines.”
Earnest highlighted figures that confirmed greater than 27% of Southwest’s scheduled seats on flights out of Denver had been canceled between Dec. 18 and Jan. 5, in contrast with 5.5% of United’s scheduled seats. Throughout January, as a sequence of snowstorms hit, Southwest canceled greater than 5% of scheduled seats, in comparison with about 2% for United.
During the vacation interval, United additionally carried out higher on cancellations in Denver than Alaska, Spirit and Frontier airways, based on the airline’s figures.
Notably, United Express flights, that are operated by regional companions together with SkyWest Airlines utilizing smaller jets, have been rather more susceptible to weather-related cancellations than United mainline flights. Earnest mentioned the figures he cited for United included these regional flights.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”