The Airlines Are Giving the People What They Want
You can mandate comfort in the skies- but then fewer Americans will be able to afford leisure travel.
Anyone of a certain age- an age I have to grudgingly admit I have attained- remembers an airline experience that was very different than the one today. I flew on some interesting flights when I was young. For instance, I flew on an Alaska Airlines flight just as it was starting to branch out from its base in Alaska, from Burbank to Seattle, and was served a full dinner on a tray with a hot dish (I think it was a stewed chicken), a starch, a salad, and a cookie, on the second leg of that flight, from San Francisco to Seattle (a 2 hour 15 minute flight). I flew on the late, great Pan Am, where they showed foreign films (in my case an all time great one, Cinema Paradiso), on the flight. I have great memories of these flights.
But they were also expensive. I remember specifically having to book a trip from Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida, about 8 months in advance to get the lowest fare. I actually saved up money to take the trip. The ticket price, in 2023 dollars, was almost $1200, a LOT of money for a young adolescent to save up! And that was the absolute lowest cut-rate fare, which required me to change planes in St. Louis on TWA, as well as the months long advance purchase.
Further, it isn’t as though the experience of flying was all moonlight and magnolias back then. Frequent flyer programs were embryonic— you could fly American enough and earn a free flight, but they hadn’t invented “status” yet and if you wanted to upgrade to First Class, you had to pay, through the nose. (I once took a deposition of an expert on the airline industry and, during small talk, asked what it would have cost to fly my flight to Orlando way back when in First Class. He said there were no discounted First Class fares back then and gave a number that in 2023 dollars would amount to $6300 round trip. You weren’t getting an upgrade!) Onboard, you might have 7 audio channels. If you were lucky, on a longer flight you could watch a movie on a hard to view small communal screen and with terrible audio being piped through acoustic headphones. (That’s right, the headphones didn’t even have speakers. They were just tubes that carried the sound acoustically to your ears.) Ticket, boarding pass, and baggage check lines at the airport were extremely long; I missed a flight once going to the 1996 Olympics where I got to the airport 2 1/2 hours in advance.
And when you missed a plane, things were a lot worse. Computer systems couldn’t rebook you- you needed to stand in what another very long line at the airport, and since the flights were infrequent, you might have to stand by on some flight as late as the next day before you lucked out and got a middle seat and were able to fly home.
And most importantly, flying wasn’t as safe back then. Major airlines crashed their planes every year. When you factor in their were less flights, the rate of fatal air crashes was far higher than it is now.
But people remember the food, and they remember that the planes weren’t as full (at least if it wasn’t the holiday season), and they remember the legroom (and even here, memories are a little clouded; seat pitch in economy on United Airlines the first time I flew it was 31 inches; now it is 30 to 31 inches).
What happened to the airline industry is that when the industry was deregulated, it turned out that there was a large segment of purchasers of airline tickets who buy purely on price. They didn’t care about an inflight meal, they didn’t care about seat pitch, and they didn’t even care if they were flying a big airline with lots of flights to rebook the passenger on when something went wrong. They would call their travel agent, or later go on the Internet, and take the cheapest fare.
Indeed, people so want to fly cheaply that some airlines that offer almost intentionally awful service became wildly profitable. On Ryanair, the most popular airline in Europe, everything is charged for, from seat selection to carry on and checked baggage to soft drinks to even printing your boarding pass out. You can’t even do a proper connection- you have to buy two tickets and recheck your bags. And yet people love Ryanair and swear by the fact that they can now fly everywhere. (By the way, the next time you hear a railfan swoon about how Europeans love trains, remember that millions of Europeans couldn’t wait to get out of the trains and into airplanes, even on an airline that delivered terrible service like Ryanair.) Ryanair is so popular that two other big European airlines, Vueling and Easyjet, basically offer the same product and are also wildly popular. Here in the United States, Spirit Airlines adopted the same business model and rode it right into profitability.
Meanwhile, it’s not as though you can’t get better service from the airlines. Airlines offer tiers of service depending on how much you pay. Want a seat assignment and a carry-on bag? Move up from basic economy to economy. Want extra legroom? There’s economy plus. Want a nice big seat and good food on an international flight? Fly premium economy. And, of course, at the top end, business class is much, much nicer than it used to be, with lie flat beds to sleep in, special lounges in all the major airports around the world, and a host of amenities. (Business class is also generally much cheaper than it once was, adjusted for inflation, and far more paths are available for frequent flyers to upgrade to it.)
So you have a world where you can fly cheap, fly in comfort, or fly in luxury. The amount of consumer choice is amazing. And yet, people hate it. Or, to be more specific, a very specific type of person who has an outsized voice in the Discourse hates it.
You see, the one group that has truly been hurt by the new model of airline service is journalists. They often have to fly places to cover stories; however, they also do not receive the type of compensation that includes the right to fly premium tickets on company money. They have to fly the cheapest coach tickets. And the cheapest coach ticket, instead of being my glorious old flight on Alaska or TWA, is now something akin to Spirit (or at least basic economy on the legacy airlines, which is a lot like Spirit). If a reporter wants to upgrade to decent comfort, he has to pay for the upgrade himself out of pocket. So journalists hate the airlines, and since they have a lot of power in the Discourse, they whip up that hatred among their readers and on sites like Twitter.
But at the end of the day, I don’t see why what is essentially a labor relations problem between a certain segment of elite employees and their employers should be used to deprive vacationers of the cheap Spirit Airlines and basic economy tickets that allow them the freedom to travel. If the average traveler wanted more service, this might be different. But again, if the average traveler wanted more service, Spirit and Ryanair wouldn’t be so successful.