David J.
Danto
Business travel
thoughts in my own, personal opinion
eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD
What Have We Done?
As I write this blog I’m reading that
JetBlue has made an offer to buy Spirit. That story
is all over the news this morning.
Somewhat buried in the story is JetBlue’s CEO blaming poor mobile phone
performance while he was riding the train for the story leaking early:
Many of us had to do a double-take
reading that tweet. The CEO of an
airline that flies the very same route chose to take an Amtrak train instead of
flying on his own airline.
What the heck have we done to the
commercial aviation industry when the CEO also prefers paying for (not all that
great) Amtrak service instead of flying in his own planes – a route that would
ostensibly be free for him.
When taking a closer look, the
answer is everything about the flying experience is lousy and out of control.
· Aircraft
manufacturers are driven by Wall Street profits. Greed has overtaken safety (as I detailed here.)
· Airport
Security is ridiculous. The TSA changes
rules and policies at will (see
this Twitter thread for one example), charges for a smoother experience
(Pre-Check) yet provides it so unreliably that a private
company is able to charge more than the government for a service that actually
works better.
· Airport
vendor price gouging is out of control and has been for years. A bottle of water costs as much as a case of
water bottles at the store.
· The airport
experience has completely changed from a way for travelers to get where they
need to be efficiently, to a place where vendors can drop stores, kiosks, bars
and other things in the way of passengers trying to get to their gates (just to
drain as much money from travelers as possible) regardless of what it does to
the traveling objective. (I detailed many of these issues
in the past in this blog.)
· The
airlines…well…I’m trying to find a way to say this diplomatically…um…suck.
Unless you’re paying full price for a first class experience – and doing so
frequently enough to be amongst the upper-top tier of flyers – then you are
likely being treated like garbage by your chosen airline. Competition has been severely diminished by
airline M&A activity, loyalty now exists in name only, and the people
running the airlines solidly believe they are there to serve Wall Street banks,
not passengers / customers.
It’s clearly well past time that we
knock it all down and start over. The
pandemic offered us the opportunity to do just that – by letting the airlines
fail and instituting a government take-over of flying. (It wouldn’t have been nirvana for sure, but
it would have been better than the greed-focused firms we have now.) Instead, we shoveled billions of taxpayer
money to the failing airlines without asking anything of them in return. They were supposed to use the money to keep
idled staff on the payroll so they’d be ready for a return to flying. They didn’t.
They used the money to do other things and got hit with a staffing
crunch as flying levels rose. (As we’ve
said before, airline companies are Capitalists during economic good times but
Socialists during economic bad times.)
So, should we allow an airline
(who’s CEO must find the traveling experience on his own planes so horrible
that he prefers to take the train) to buy a smaller airline (with already
poorly rated service) further consolidating the airline industry and further
stifling competition? Of course
not. Will we? Who knows?
As any frequent traveler can tell you, everything can always get
worse. We should all see if Amtrak has
any more room…
This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal
opinions.
All image and links provided above as reference under
prevailing fair use statutes.
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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or
disagree. Hearing from the traveling
community is always a highlight for me.
Thanks!