Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [1]
Bill immediately confers with Cheryl about response tactics. The most obvious option is combative confrontation, refusing to yield ground to a fickle bully, whoever the culprit is. Bill in particular likes this approach viscerally but doubts it will work. Drawing from his many years of poker experience, he says, “Aggression succeeds when you’ve got the best hand or can effectively bluff an opponent. We have decent cards in this case, because of the late, clumsy shift in policy, but they control the awards. They’re holding pocket aces, known ironically in poker slang as ‘American Airlines’ because of the A.A. initials. About all we can hope for is a split pot.”
Cheryl asks if he could get help from friends in London at British Airways, one of the major ONEworld alliance partners. Two decades ago, when the airline was in transition from public to private ownership, Bill served as a management consultant at the highest levels of the corporation’s marketing, information management, and strategic planning departments. “Everyone I could call for advice has left now, but I know something about the power politics of the business. If we overreach, they’ll squash us like pesky bugs.”
After talking through the situation for more than an hour, we decide to try accommodation, at least at first, to give Sam a chance to fulfill his promise of painless surgery. When Sam calls back shortly, Bill affects a nonchalant air, asking him for suggestions on salvaging our travel plans. “We can cut three legs in the United States if you simply pay for direct, nonstop flights—much better, don’t you agree, Mr. Jamison?—between your home airport in Albuquerque and your overseas departure city of Los Angeles.”
“That’s reasonable, Sam,” Bill says, not mentioning that we’ve been considering the idea anyway.
“Then for some of the additional frequent-flier miles still in your accounts, we can switch your three flights inside Australia on Qantas to a separate reward package, removing them from this itinerary.” Bill balks briefly at this, mostly as a bluff, until Sam offers to rebate some of the miles later.
These changes bring us down to seventeen legs, one of which is the gap, or “open jaw” in airline lingo, between our arrival and departure cities in Australia, covered now by the separate set of tickets. In other conversations over the next two business days, Sam encourages Bill to propose another cut. Bill has one in mind as a last resort—paying for our relatively inexpensive flights between London and Nice—but he politely protests that a simple break in the itinerary between destinations should not be counted as a flight segment. Sam asks, almost in exasperation, “Why aren’t you getting angry with me? Everyone does.”
Bill changes the subject to avoid the question but thinks to himself, “Aha, now he’s beginning to feel defensive.” Apparently Sam convinces the committee to allow Bill’s point about the open jaw because he graciously stows the scalpel without mentioning the matter again.
By this time we regard Sam as a genuine ally, a savvy manager trying to balance assistance to customers of his airline against demands laid down by other airline partners providing us most of our free Business Class seats. He never implies in any way that he’s caught in the middle of this situation, but it seems increasingly likely to us. In looking back on the problem after the trip, we suspect the impetus for the after-the-fact rule change came from a foreign partner, perhaps Qantas, which unlike the other ONEworld carriers, consistently treated us like hobo freeloaders, often authorizing only Coach Class tickets and refusing to upgrade them, as Sam said they would, when Business seats sat empty.
In the end, despite the minor glitches, everyone wins. The committee flexes