Fly the not-so-friendly skies

This whole incident and reaction is making me bump my prefer-to-drive to prefer-to-fly distance marker. These days I’d say it’s approaching 7-8 hours drive time, flying is that bad.

Shit, mine is far higher than that. Can I get there in a day? If so, drive. I’d rather drive to Denver (~12 hours) than fly, if possible. Basically the gulf coast, and anything west of Colorado, is fly zone. Anything less is drive.

But I’ve also got a family, and am cheap like that too. Flying 4 people ain’t cheap. Not to mention you need to get a rental car.

I live in a hub city, so it’s not that bad. And I travel for work, so I guess you get used to it?

For me it’s just over 4 hours. Flights can be had pretty cheaply anymore and to be honest, most of the time when I make the drive/flight decision is when I’m taking a vacation. And that’s when I value my time the most.

Anything within eight to ten hours is pretty much “Drive” for me, unless there is some weird time restriction or maybe a massive mountain range.

But I’m 6’6", so my tolerance for airplane seats is probably far, FAR lower than for most humans… unless I get “Economy Plus” or whatever, I really can’t fit into that shoebox for more than two hours. Anything longer than that and I’ll start to actually do my circulation or knees some serious harm.

At 280 and having an appearance that draws TSA gropey-searches without fail, I will drive whenever possible. We did about 10hrs to Ohio for a concert not once but twice (cuz the first show got canceled an hour before go time) and didn’t blink an eye. . .

I believe we should have seen this coming.

-xtien

It is rational, you are correct. It’s rational in a pure market sense, in that people are clearly willing to accept the level of service they are getting for the price they are paying. They have demonstrated time and again that they don’t want to pay more, and will put up with pretty much anything to get cheap flights. Hence my point above that we should not be surprised when shit goes pearshaped. It’s part of the package.

Now, deregulation is part of this, though. If you take a less laissez faire approach, and see air travel as more of a public utility or at least a public interest, and make all the players meet certain minimum standards, perhaps at the cost of higher fares, or taxes to subsidize improvements, you could actually make things a lot better. They used to be better, way back when, and could be again. But we’ve decided that cost is the only thing that matters, and, well, so be it.

We get what we deserve.

In theory we could get there again with telecommuting and the like, but now the general public has gotten used to the idea of cheap air travel, so maybe not. They treat it like a sky bus: you wont like it, but it’s fairly quick so whatever, you suffer through it as part of the “cost”.

I don’t see how fewer people flying will make seats cheaper or better. I mean I telecommunicate with my 2 year old nephew almost weekly… I still like to see him in person a couple times a year.

Take out the business class, more telework, and prices would go up not down. When I fly on business, which is not often, they pay a hell of a lot more than I ever do in person, and they typically buy refundable seats too.

Oh prices would go up, but the quality of the experience would as well. Again, I don’t think it will happen, because, as you said, we’re used to it and willing to pay the price in annoyance and inconvenience. Back when it was a “rich people” thing it was a better experience, but a whole hell of a lot less people interacted with it.

Basically, we get what we pay for, which is a glorified bus. Hell, almost a flying box car at this point, but whatever it beats spending days on travel.

You need to act like you WANT it. If someone is gonna be made uncomfortable, make sure it’s them.

When I traveled on Greyhound in college, I got treated by them a lot better than I do by the airlines. The other passangers could be interesting though.

Also, I think prices would go up, but I have zero confidence in the quality getting better. What’s option B. If you want to go to Hong Kong… you gonna take a cargo ship? They don’t really have to compete.

Well international flights open up more competition since you’ll be dealing with carriers from that nation, at least in theory. You don’t have to worry about Korean Air’s service and quality as say Delta flying from Chicago to Atlanta. But for LAX to Seoul, suddenly you do. Plus those longer flights are going to make comfort matter a heck of a lot more. Grinning and bearing it for 2 hours and doing the same thing for 13 hours is a pretty big difference.

I’m 6’7" or so. When I was in my mid-twenties I flew coach… from Salt Lake City to Madrid.

Never. Again.

This guy was coming home from Japan I believe.

Oops no that was another passenger I guess, same flight though so essentially same terrible service.

Option B is a different airline. The airline industry is very internally competitive. As to quality of service, business and up is generally pretty good. In the most simple scenario, you can imagine that a revised market is simply cutting the economy business out of the loop, with prices and quality of business and up staying static. I don’t know what the profit distribution is between business segments right now (e.g., is one carrying the other) and I don’t know what the economies of scale are, either.

Basically, I can’t see why quality wouldn’t go up if prices go up. The upper tier segment is much more price elastic (either because they’re rich or because companies are footing the tab) and care a lot more about quality, instead of price-trumps-all. There’s already a lot of competition up there with lay flat seats, cabin quality, etc.

How are you defining quality. I am defining it by service. That’s kind of like saying as cable prices go up the quality of goes up… well maybe if you consider quantity as the ultimate measure of quality. if you think of customer service, well you don’t have to go far to find another industry that keeps increasing prices that doesn’t really have competition or good customer sanctification.

As for competition, after they introduce a new fee… how long before the other airlines start charging for the same thing?

That’s because the new fee is almost invariably paired with a price drop. The airlines moving on the fees tend to be the budget airlines. The mainline carriers then get price pressure to drop their prices, and at the same time, introduce their own fee. Where mainline carriers compete back is keeping those features (e.g., “free” luggage) in their loyalty programs—something the budget carriers can’t compete with because they can’t compete on diversity of routes. So, for the frequent traveler, the mainline carrier ends up being competitive, even though the base price tends to cost more than the budget—but that elasticity only goes so far in economy class.

The whole extra fee thing is frankly just another form of market segmentation/efficiency. There is a large portion of the flying public that is completely price-inelastic/cheap. They will literally buy one seat over another, if it is $5 cheaper, net for their needs. If they don’t have baggage, they don’t care that baggage isn’t free.

Look, it’s hard to have meaningful discussions in this thread if you resist the fact that the airline business is extremely competitive. Comparing it to cable companies (which have effective monopolies in their region) isn’t accurate, at all.

The point isn’t that there is a fee. The point is these airlines move together. I mean sure in some industries you see FORD turn right and then Honda, Toyota and VW turn right too but in an healthy industry, sometimes a few of them turn left and one might actually turn right and then left. The Airline Industry move a lot in unison. I question any claim that there is any real competition amongst the domestic airlines.

You might call it a lack of meaningful discussion. I call it a disagreement.

But don’t just take my word for it:

The problem is more to do with the number of competitors. The reasons that American regulators allowed the sector to consolidate from seven major carriers to four is well known: they were badly run, and many had been forced to seek protection from creditors through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But, having approved the wave of mergers, it would be a bit rich for officials to complain that there are not enough big airlines to ensure competition.

If America was really serious about the issue, it could deal with it in a stroke: open up the domestic aviation market to foreign competition and allow Ryanair, Emirates and the like to fly whichever routes they wanted. (And, yes, the European Union and the Middle East should extend the same courtesy to airlines from outside their regions.) That is not going to happen, of course. It is so much easier to reprimand the incumbents.

From the economist. What normally happens in a market where all the major players can’t manage their companies… they would fold making room for others. The discount airlines are there sure but we don’t allow the foreign companies to compete here, domestically.

So much better than the $1k that they might have had to spend.