We have a new airline coming to town. On Monday, December 8th, the Bakersfield Californian
reported that Continental Airlines will be offering twice daily direct
flights to and from Houston starting April 4th. This story was followed
by three separate half page advertisements about Continental’s new service. I
read the story, looked at the ads and headed for my computer.
There
was a slight problem though. Accessing Continental’s website at www.continental.com,
I tried to look up spring fares to Panama. An error message came back
saying that Continental doesn’t serve the Bakersfield market. How weird I thought,
since each one of the print advertisements said to "book now". How
could I possibly book a flight if Continental’s own web site didn’t even recognize
our town? I then decided to give Continental a call and see what the problem
was.
According to a representative for Continental, their computer
system hadn’t been fully configured for our new market. She said the problem
should be corrected with 24 hours to 7 days. I asked her about the price
matching with Los Angeles fares for the first 60 days which was reported in the
Californian. She told me that she didn’t know anything about that and said she
could only quote the fare that comes up in the computer. I then asked
her if she could quote me a fare from Bakersfield to Panama in late April. Her
response was that the system wouldn’t let her. So then I asked about a fare from
Los Angeles to Panama which I had already priced at $705 on the computer earlier
in the morning. She quoted a fare of over $1,000 for these same dates.
Frustrated,
I decided to call the County of Kern Department of Airports
and see why this confusion was taking place. A representative for Ray Bishop who
is the Director, told me that they had also already realized there was a booking
problem. They wanted to know what I had found out from the airline and seemed
surprised that I was told it could possibly take over a week to correct this
glitch. I then asked about the price matching which was reported and they told
me that it was not actually confirmed as they were still working out pricing
details. I found it to be a bit misleading that Mr. Bishop would announce
this to the Kern County residents when in fact it had never actually been confirmed
and agreed upon with Continental.
In my opinion this was somewhat
of a public relations blunder which occurred because a few of the company
officials from Continental Airlines would be in town that same day to finalize
the details. Obviously the timing of the Meadows Field expansion advertisement
was to impress the executives, and to let them know that good times lay ahead for
our smoggy skies. Had somebody jumped the gun? Is being a bit over-eager
so bad? The following day the Californian reported that our Mayor Harvey Hall
had taken some time off from worrying about ambulance rate increases so he could
meet and greet the Continental executives.
So how will all of this
affect Bakersfield and Kern County? Hopefully it will be a good thing
as it adds a fourth town that we can fly directly to. The others being San Francisco,
Los Angeles and Phoenix. By comparison, Fresno our neighbor to the north
can fly direct to over 15 cities from their airport including such obscure places
as Des Moines, Iowa and Guadalajara, Mexico. They can also choose from over
10 different airlines to fly out on. Why do they have it so much better
than we do? A few reasons include their larger population base and also most likely
because of their more remote location to a large city. Since Bakersfield
is considered to be within the backyard of the Los Angeles general region we must
suffer or at least be inconvenienced. Reasonably priced alternatives such
as driving or the Airport Bus seem to tempt many to LAX in lieu of air travel.
Continental
will be cautiously looking at Bakersfield in hopes of
generating near capacity flights. If this isn’t happening within the first six
months, look for them to pull right back out just as many others have done in
the past. The problem I see with Continental is that their fares never seem
to be that competitive with other airlines. The business traveler is much more
valuable to an airline than a bare bones bargain hunting vacationer.
Continental even made this point clear with their published comment "we hope
to pick up a lot of business flyers since they tend to be loyal and willing
to pay a higher ticket price"
So much for the idea of picking up some rock
bottom fares to your desired exotic destination!
But something is
better than nothing right? Actually by taking the early AM flight from Bakersfield
to Houston, you will now be able to easily connect to another flight into the
Caribbean , Mexico or Central America. This will most likely allow you
to arrive at you final destination in time for an early dinner. If you were
to head down to LA to catch a late morning/early afternoon flight, you would
most likely not be arriving to your final destination until very late into the
night. So the trade off may be a higher priced flight which will allow you the
convenience of leaving from Bakersfield and arriving in time to enjoy some of
your first day of your much needed vacation. Maybe this isn’t so bad after
all.
If all goes well, it was reported that we may soon be seeing
the likes of Delta to Salt Lake City, Horizon to Seattle, and possibly
even a direct flight to the 50th State on Aloha Airlines. My suggestion is that
we first look at some of the smaller alternatives like Aero California which offers
low cost flights to many areas throughout Mexico. This step would allow Bakersfield’s
airport to be recognized as an International facility. Until then
be thankful for the newest addition to Meadows Field, even if it may not be the
bargain airline that I was hoping for.
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