USAirways nixes peanuts & pretzels

On page 10 of today’s (7 June 08) print edition of Huntington’s Herald Dispatch they noted that USAirways was discontinuing serving free peanuts and pretzels aboard their flights. The article indicated that these snacks cost the airline $0.03 per passengers. Yes that’s three (3) cents a head.

You might ask does three (3) pennies really matter. So I decided to pull some statistics on load factors and passengers boarded to determine what the carrier was actually saving.

In January and February 2008 USAirways enplaned 944, 000 passengers. At $.03 cents a head they would have saved about $28,000.00 for that period. Expand these estimates for the year and an annual savings estimate would be around $170,000.00.

I’ve got to figure out what costs I can cut around the Travel Professor’s house to save that sort of money. Any suggestions anyone?