Say bon voyage to a friendly in-flight travel companion for the past 25 years. SkyMall has crashed.
Last week, SkyMall LLC, which publishes the well-known in-flight catalog, and its parent company, Xhibit Corp., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Phoenix court. SkyMall has suspended operations and fired nearly a third of its staff.
The company’s interim management says it's hoping to keep the SkyMall brand alive through a sale. But it’s difficult to see who the buyer would be considering major airlines, such as Delta and Southwest, already have canceled their deal to carry the catalog on their planes and other airlines are likely to follow as the company faces the financial abyss.
Perusing the SkyMall magazine at 35,000 feet on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, it was hard to imagine someone feeling the immediate need to spend $1,800 on an electric unicycle or $70 and on a lithograph of a drunken cat($1,200 if you wanted it on canvas). I will cop to a passing interest in the “LaserComb” that promised to regrow hair, because, well, what if it worked! But I never actually considered buying the thing.
When you consider many of the unintentionally hilarious products in its pages, it's remarkable that it stayed afloat for as long as it did.-
I was in the minority, however, because people apparently were shopping at 35,000 feet, lots of them. SkyMall’s strategy was based on those pure numbers. It said it reached roughly 650 million passengers each year. So SkyMall negotiated deals to make it the exclusive in-flight catalog partner for numerous airlines. Ultimately its reach covered 90% of the passengers on U.S. flights. And the company’s internal research indicated that about 70% of all passengers read SkyMall on every flight.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ol-skymall-20150128-story.html
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