Comment by miki123211
9 hours ago
Ryanair (EU) also does this, but the US is indeed pretty obnoxious here.
United even has commercials before the safety video; combined with the "if you're watching explicit content on this flight, please mind the children" announcement, those flights onestly honestly felt pretty surreal to me.
United has gotten worse and worse with this. The ads after (not before) the safety video, and also before each movie you watch (and it's usually the same ads before every movie). A few years ago the ads were skippable, but not anymore.
The flight attendant also makes an announcement about the United-branded credit cards near the beginning of the flight.
But this is really just an illustration of what the top-poster of this thread said: flying people places doesn't make enough money, so they have to pursue other revenue streams.
Can't they just raise prices?
The annoying thing is... I already have a United card :) (and being able to board early and bring a normal size carry-on on basic economy is one of the best perks).
> flying people places doesn't make enough money
Does it not make enough money for viability, or does it not make enough money for sociopath types in C-suites?
If it’s the latter, there will never be enough money for them and will keep pushing increasingly absurd customer-milking initiatives.
There's not a single major US airline that is profitable on charging passengers for tickets and flying them to destinations.
United is the closest, with only a 0.04¢ loss on every seat mile.[1] the other airlines lose 1-2¢/mile.
The jets are a loss leader for credit cards.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-airlines-lost-money-flyin...
[1] There's two metrics airlines report: Cost per Available Seat Mile and Passenger Revenue per Available Seat Mile.
This is the cost/revenue for flying a seat, which may or may not be occupied by a person, to a destination. If the seat is empty it gets $0 in revenue but still costs money.
You can calculate the profit made from selling tickets per seat mile by PRASM - CASM.