It was super convenient to fly out of Mather Field to San Jose and be door to door in like an hour and change. But prob uneconomical in today's zoom world although I imagine the cost of lost time going from PDX to SMF then getting to the local office means losing half a days work.
All of these companies cutting perks after decades of luring people in to work is peak corporate behaviour when you want to show your investors that you are well behaved. Conveniently forgetting how they got there in the first place....
I bet the snacks and legroom aren’t much better on the commercial options… but this seems pretty wasteful regardless. Let intel staff take commercial and let the commercial airlines improve the service on these routes for everybody else
I've flown on my company's corporate shuttle and the experience was way better than commercial.
It flew out of a small airport used only for corporate and private planes:
- register for the flight online on company website
- free parking at airport, about a 5 min walk to the small terminal
- show up 15 min before take off, only showing your employee ID
- no security check for baggage
- walk out a door right onto the plane that was 20 ft away
- not a busy airport, so it was pretty much close door, taxi to runway, take off in 5 min
- way better snacks and drinks; legroom was the same as a commuter aircraft, but you could just sit where ever you wanted, no assigned seats
- stops were about 10 min (the shuttle ran a route of 4 cities with major operations) - taxi plane to terminal, throw the trash bags off, let a few passengers get off, a couple get on, close the door, taxi and take off
It was cheaper for the company to operate this service than play commercial rates because the plane was usually >75% full most flights
This is how Area 51 works, for example. There is a commuter flight that leaves from a smaller general aviation field in Las Vegas, and goes back and forth between the Air Force base multiple times per day. Civilians working on the site live in the city, and yet can be at work way upstate in the desert in less than an hour door-to-door. It’s a good system and not too expensive to operate.
Can't read the article, but was the company shuttle flying out of general aviation? The time saved by avoiding commercial flight screening processes was probably substantial. An MSN article [1] shows they flew out of Hillsboro airport, which doesn't have commercial scheduled passenger flight operations as far as I can tell, and is also much closer to the Intel office. So a lot of potential time and hassle savings.
Now here's a business concerned with climate change...
And they still managed to fail at competing in the marketplace.