"Dan Luke" wrote in message
...
"Guy Elden Jr." wrote:
There's absolutely no excuse for the
way they treat the smaller guy there except greed. IMO.

I've often seen this charge made against Signature and others. My question
is, if it's true, why are they doing it? How does it hurt their business
for
small prop airplanes to stop and buy fuel?
--


I would guess that they see their profit in servicing the high end of GA and
are aiming to monopolize that market by targeting fields they see as
strategic. To them, small GA planes are an annoyance and in order to make
their target minimum profit per plane they have to either charge a large
amount for fuel or hit you with a significant ramp fee. They want to be a
private network of terminals for fractional jets.

I do not contest that it is expensive to build, maintain, staff and supply a
quality FBO. However, when large numbers of customers are shocked by out of
line charges and make a conscious decision to avoid a certain chain of FBOs
it is not a good thing for anyone. If they had charged me maybe $5 for
dropping by I wouldn't have felt ripped off and would consider returning.
Some days I would only buy a couple of sodas and look at the weather
computer, other days I would top off my tanks and maybe buy some plates for
an area I am heading into and they would on average make some bucks from me.
Now if they keep away a lot of the GA fleet they are not making a lot of
money. One of the line guys said it was very quiet there with not many
planes showing up. I'm sure they are running that operation at a loss. Now
if they could make it real attractive for more of the GA population they
might very well be able to make a profit, but with the way they acted, I'm
not so sure I'd want that.

I'll tell you one thing, though. If I ever find myself stopping at
Signature again I am sure as heck getting my money's worth out of them in
services.