Airlines in a Crisis

Who convinces airlines that the solution for all their problems are a rebrand. Or for any othe rcompany for that matter. Rumours are coming out that Flybe was weeks from a rebrand when they collapsed. A rebrand due to some baggage failure that supposedly had made the airline name toxic ant that could only be fixed with a new name.  Remember a new name is unknown in the market and will not only cost to effectuate but also swallow up massive amounts of cash for marketing to get it known so potential passengers can trust it enough to book with it. And trust is important in the airline sector. We trust after all the Airline to bring us safely from A to B and that is not all ablout that we get value for our bucks but that we actually arrive physically safe.  That kind of trust is not easily built so any rebrand will have to be linked to the old brand name and suddenly the whole purpose of it evaporated. The only winners are the marketers and their often outside brand designer helpers, that

  If the Wizz air chief is right in that CoVid19 will lead to a permanently reduced airline passenger market combined with more direct flights and much less hub and spoke, then the LoCo's are going for the wrong aircraft with their demand for more and more seats per aircraft. More direct routes and less demand should mean a market of planes with less seats each to avoid the booking confusion of trice weekly flights instead of daily. After all sample Ryanair made their lo-co start with 130 seat planes, then 186 seat and soon they will be up to 200 and then 220 with an extra cabincrew. Larger planes and still just 2 pilots in them might lower costs per seat but if they have to keep fire-selling the seats could it decrease profit per planeload.

 There are speculations that Ryanair will place a further 150 ExMax orders before Christmas if the plane is given the all clear to fly again by then. But in case what would this order consist of. To get the best deal they would probably have to take some of the estimated 100 white tails. These are built planes where the customer have gone or cancelled the order and most of them are of versions 8 or 9. Ryanair have ordered version 10 with 230 seats a longer fuselage, an extra emergency exit and a levered landing gear to avoid tail strikes. Not many of them are built or abandoned. Running 2 types of the airplane would be against the grain of Ryanair. However the group now consists of 3 airlines. Ryanair DAC, Buzz, Malta Air and Lauda. And the last one have earlier this year abandoned its Airbus order. There is nothing in the Low Cost rulebook saying that Lauda couldn't be an ExMax 9 only airline. Lauda air is the airline for the german speaking part of Europe. One could speculate in