“People didn’t care”: Frontier CEO slams Southwest on free bag policy | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

In a constant effort to stick it to competitors, Denver-based low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines (ULCC) tried luring over passengers with free checked bags just after Southwest Airlines (LUV) scrapped their decades-old policy and started charging for them.

The promotion was launched a month after Southwest first announced the change back in March and, as Frontier chief executive Barry Biffle said at the Skift Global Travel forum in New York on September 17, was a move that the airline now considers to have been a mistake.

Frontier CEO says airline’s free bag promotion “worked great for about a week”

“We thought ‘gosh, Southwest built this plan around free bags,” Biffle said. “We looked at it said ‘this could really be something’ but how did that work out? It worked great for about a week. We had huge bookings come in and then it flatlined, customers didn’t care.”

The promotion allowed travelers whose fare class would otherwise not include a free bag to claim one on trips booked by April 7 for travel between later in the month and August. Southwest, meanwhile, has had the free bag policy for decades and had become associated with it.

The decision to scrap it came after Elliott Investment Management bought enough company stock to call shareholder meetings and immediately started pushing for cost-cutting changes to get the Dallas-based carrier out of a long string of unprofitable quarters — the bag move was by far the most unpopular as it left many travelers who stuck with Southwest because of it feeling betrayed and with no remaining reason to choose it over a competitor.

Biffle, meanwhile, said that the customer outcry was overblown as promises to not fly with Southwest ultimately did not make a difference in the bottom line anymore than Frontier’s efforts to poach passengers with its own promotion. He said that Frontier’s new plan is to focus on increasing passenger volume by expanding route networks to more markets.

Frontier competes for passengers with other low-cost carriers like Southwest and Spirit.

Image source&colon; Frontier Airlines

“Southwest should have been charging for bags 20 years ago”: Biffle

“Don’t look at what people say, look at what they do,” Biffle continued further at the forum. “You need to look at what the wallet does not what they say because their bark is much worse than their bite. I think on the margin, there was a handful of people who moved over but at the end of the day it just goes to show “Southwest should have been charging for bags 20 years ago.”

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In his speech at Skift, Biffle also expressed hopes of economic improvement if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates on Wednesday and customers who abuse wheelchair assistance services by pretending to be more disabled than they are to get priority boarding or other preferential treatment — an issue that has been coming up at airports and discussions in the airlines space more and more frequently in recent months.

“There needs to be some sort of regulation around who gets it and who’s abusing it because what’s unfortunate is that there are people who do need those services that are being crowded out because we’re oversupplying the system by people that are cheating to jump the line.”