THE AIRPORT EQUIVALENT OF SIGNING UP FOR A BUNCH OF CREDIT CARDS: The Wandering Aramean brings us word that an obscure airline called Cape Air is running a sale on flights between a few cities. If the flights aren’t already sold out by now, you can fly between Lebanon, NH and either Boston or White Plains, NY for only $12. As if that’s not generous enough, the White Plains trip includes transportation into Manhattan. It’s actually cheaper to get to Manhattan from Lebanon than from LaGuardia.
And the reason for the benevolence on the part of Cape Air? Lebanon Airport is trying to pass 10,000 departures for the year. Apparently that’s the threshold for federal airport funding going from $150,000 to $1,000,000. Make sense now?
Cape Air isn’t the first airline to engage in this sort of thing. Wandering Aramean also directed us to this story about a British airline hiring actors to go on flights for essentially the same reason–in this case it was to avoid paying a penalty for falling below a certain threshold.
People like to grumble about (fill in the blank with your pet peeve) being too greedy, but faulting people for responding to financial incentives is like faulting gravity for plane crashes. Now the people who designed the incentives–that’s another story.
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