I recently booked a round trip ticket to Charlottesville, Virginia on United Airlines. The price was good, the times were good, and it was very easy to book the flights on Expedia. There was just one little catch. A few days before my trip, I noticed that I had accidentally booked the return flight for a day later than planned. I called Expedia and later the airline to ask if I could change the date. Of course, I knew that they would ask for a penalty of $100 in addition to whatever price change had occurred, and indeed they informed me that a change to the correct date would cost $100 plus a $49 upgrade price for the different "class of service". My current price class was sold out. Of course, my tickets were the usual "discount restricted" fare, not the "full price coach" fare which hardly anyone pays. For "full price" you get the privilege of changing your itinerary at the last minute, and they get an extra $500 of your money. Obviously, no sane person would pay full price, though business travelers often do.
Now, I have some experience in the wonderful world of air travel, having worked on a travel management application back in the glorious days of the Roaring Nineties. I know that there are different classes of service within Coach: Y class, H class, and so on. However, I also know that when I board an aircraft, all the seats in the economy section look exactly alike; the drinks and food, when provided at all, are also exactly the same. Why airlines insist on having different price levels for some of these seats is still a mystery; it's like going to the grocery store and seeing different prices for the exact same apples that were picked from the same trees on the very same day. Obviously they would like to advertise much lower prices than most of their seats actually cost, and somehow they can get away with it, unlike the less fortunate apple vendor who must either sell at a consistent and reasonable price or else throw away his apples at the end of the week.
The $100 "penalty" for changing is surely the most onerous of the airlines' many methods of annoying travelers. This policy is probably there to discourage fickle travelers from sowing confusion with a lot of last minute changes, but it also inhibits people like me from correcting disastrous mistakes or adapting gracefully to changes in our schedules. The fact is, in the real world people's lives do not remain static during the several weeks between booking a reasonably priced ticket and the actual dates of travel; things come up, our needs change, and we are nonetheless stuck with itineraries etched in stone as it were. The sole exception I have found is that a traveler can "stand by" for a different flight on the same day of travel only.
I have just about had it with the greed, arrogance, and stupidity of the airlines. Their arbitrary "rules" make the traveler's life harder and provide nothing in the way of compensation. If all these penalties and restrictions meant a safer and more efficient flying experience, I would almost forgive them, but it does not.
You may also notice that while the traveler has almost no rights when it comes to the majors, the majors can do almost anything they feel like. I have often seen them cancel or alter flight times and overbook flights. How they can "oversell", to use their own word, and not violate some kind of laws against false advertising is beyond me. If a flight has 120 seats and the airline sells 124 seats, then they are selling something for hard cash, which does not exist. Suppose that liftoff time arrives and no one wishes to give up their seat. Then what do they do? Everyone is either in their seats or standing in the aisles. They all need to get to their destinations today. At this point, the flight attendants begin offering progressively larger "rewards" to those who agree to take a later flight. I have seen them raise the reward in $50 increments until they get a taker. At a certain point they must be losing money on that person's fare. If they pay someone $300 to get off the plane, they lost their bet. Their bet of course was that they'd have three or four no-shows.
Well, OK, I will buy their argument that a no-show should not get his full fare refunded; obviously he has messed everybody up by not informing his airline in advance; if he did, they would be able to mark the seat as available on their reservation systems and have a better chance of selling it to someone else. But in the event that they do manage to sell the seat, they are both fining the no-show and getting a high price from the new traveler; in a high demand market they have got be making some money here. The airlines' argument for their industry-wide, oligarchic approach to restrictions and pricing hence would be that no-shows, last minute changes, and the general unpredictability of their customers forces them down this path. Unlike a bus, which simply plies its route whether or not it is full of passengers, an airplane has to plan ahead some. My problem with this argument is simply this: I am generally a predictable, reliable traveler and I do not gratuitously change itineraries; I plan ahead, I book my flights, I generally don't change my plans, and the airlines give me to understand that I am being punished for other travelers' behavior.
Then there's the baggage fiasco. Does anyone remember the templates which American, Delta, and United installed on their security scanners to prevent people from carrying on over-sized items? Continental took advantage of the opportunity to announce that their customers would suffer no such restrictions; indeed, they announced they were building larger overhead bins into their planes to accommodate their customers' needs. They even threatened to sue American Airlines over having to share American's templates at certain airports. Continental does seem to be doing things right, at least in certain areas.
But handing over your luggage to the airline at check-in time is tantamount to throwing it up in the air and hoping it lands in one piece. Many times I have sat and watched from my window seat as the baggage handlers toss the luggage like footballs. In an era of robotic surgery and unmanned exploration of Mars, why do we still need humans to do this kind of work? I would have thought that by now, the last person to touch your suitcase should be the ticketing agent who places it gently on on a ramp. Its tag would then be scanned and the bag would be automatically routed into a cart which would gently and smoothly roll your precious property onto the correct plane. Perhaps a robotic arm might come into play for loading and unloading but it should be a system designed to minimize damage to the travelers' property while maximizing efficiency (sorry, unions).
The air travel business is a tough arena and I do not envy the airlines their task, which is a huge and complex one of moving people from one point to another. The planes have to be in the right spot at the right time; if everyone is flying south from New York on December 20, all of those planes are going to fly north again, empty. They have to deal with a very real terrorism threat, kooks and drunks and neurotics who harass the employees, no-shows, and millions of mechanical problems. Then again, anyone who flies on a European or east Asian carrier (outside of China) will quickly see how poor the service and attitude are in North American carriers compared to elsewhere. It's not that hard to treat passengers with a modicum of respect and grant them the flexibility that they require.
I believe that the air transport system needs to evolve beyond the current oligarchy to a truly reliable and safe system. How this can be achieved another question. I believe airplanes should be redesigned with survivability as the number one, number two, and number three objectives. Efficiency and economical operation are somewhere down the list. This is a no-brainer for me. I would rather pay an extra $500 per flight and get there. Some of my crackpot ideas for improving air safety include a detachable passenger compartment with its own built-in parachutes, bomb-resistant kevlar-wrapped luggage containers and the aforementioned robotic control of luggage loading and unloading, as well as emergency VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability that would allow a plane to gently settle to the ground in the event of an emergency. These are ideas that a real aerospace engineer might pooh-pooh, but at least it's an attempt to get a dialogue going. I believe that our current air transport system is laughably antiquated and oligarchic. The fact that customer service is so poor is simply the lack of competition in the airline business; they raise or lower fares in lockstep and engage in the most obvious monopolistic practices, with a few exceptions.
Well, it's time to go pack for my next flight. Wish me luck...
Terry Traub, June 4, 2003
last modified August 26, 2003
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