Massive reality disconnect in the airline industry.
Maybe the major airlines are simply immune to customer needs because the demand for air travel is so very high. But this is ridiculous:
. . . James May, president of the Air Transport Association, the airlines’ lobbying group, in testimony prepared for today’s hearing that was released by his office, reiterated his group’s opposition to any time limit for stranded fliers. “Imposing an arbitrary time frame to deplane passengers will have numerous unintended consequences that are likely to increase cancellations and cause even greater delays,†his testimony said.
This entire story is worth reading if you do much travel with the big air carriers, or if you just want to see an example of an industry failing at a basic level to come to grips with the wishes and needs of its customers.
Mind you, I disagree with the implication of the Aviation Consumer Action Project representative (quoted elsewhere in the story) who wants some sort of definition of airline passengers “rights.” The term is overused in contexts like these, and while I wish the Transportation Department inspector-general’s report were stronger, I’m not sure how wise it would be for the Federal government to impose a rule about how long is too long for a plane to sit on a runway without taking off.
I am sure that the folks within the airline industry are handling this in a deeply stupid way. Mr. May’s comment, quoted above, makes sense if we’re talking about a delay of 60 minutes, or 90 minutes, or maybe even three hours. You don’t want to force JetBlue or American or Delta or whoever to return to a gate and deplane passengers at Minute #120 if they would otherwise be taking off at Minute #122.
But as the article reminds us, we’re not just talking about two- and three-hour delays — but delays of six and even nine hours. Nine hours sitting on a runway!
You’re telling me that the airlines can’t agree that, say, five hours is too long for passengers to sit on a runway? That no upper limit is acceptable? If a plane has already been sitting on a runway for five hours, the possibility that it will miss the chance to take off half an hour later is much, much less important than keeping the passengers on that plane from becoming even more furious about the delay. A voluntary four-hour cap, or a five-hour cap, or any cap, might do something to assuage passengers who are so far pretty much certain that the airlines are willing to treat them like garbage.
Why the airlines can’t grasp this is a mystery.
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[...] I ranted about this the other day. But that’s fine by me, since the issue of airlines’ moronic treatment of passengers is worth ranting about. [...]
If a passenger left on a plane for 2+ hours called 911 and said they were being held against their will……would the cops respond? Could they respond? Isn’t this, essentially, kidnapping when you are held against your will?
TC: I’m not all fired up to start lobbing kidnaping charges at the airlines — that’s not my point here, regardless of what the avenues of recourse to law enforcement might be. (My guess: you’d get a lot of *puzzled* looks from the cops, who would not attempt to interdict an airline flight unless something big-and-bad were going on, e.g. a bomb threat, a hostage situation, a potentially homicidal fellow passenger, etc.)
No, my bigger point — and Jarvis’s, I think — is about the airlines’ use of passenger “captivity” **as a key part of their business model**. Not only is it ill-advised in the short run, insofar as it tends to alienate your paying customers, but it’s also ill-advised in the long run, since it tends to open the door to disruptor/innovators who can exploit this routine maltreatment as an entrepreneurial edge.
Passengers have no idea what it takes to match them with their luggage on the same plane. Thousands of bags (luggage) come down the belt at any major airline any major station. Thousands of bags with tags for many many different flights all get handled at the same time. They are hand loaded into containers or carts and taken out to the plane they are assigned to by employees called bag runners. The airlines have cut back so many employees IN the bagroom that they can’t keep up with the thousands of bags. After a while the employee just gets frustrated with the lack of help that they just don’t care anymore. If YOU come late your bag probably won’t make it because there is no employee to make the extra effort to get it out to the plane. That’s the way MANAGEMENT wants it and if you don’t get your bag or it’s been stolen it’s because management has outsourced the baggage handling [... redacted -- pointless stereotyping. Ed.]. Not the employees’ fault. Blame management. Get there early, Get in line. Get on the airplane, sit down, shut up and hold on. That’s flying 2007.
J.D. — Clearly you speak from the heart with your comment. I don’t think anybody (certainly not me!) is blaming baggage handlers for the problems they’re experiencing. I am impressed when multiple flights hit the airport at once and all the right bags come out on all the right carousels, right on cue. I’ve had a few baggage problems over the years, but nothing beyond the pale.
Here’s the issue, though: We ARE talking about airline management here. Too many of the airlines have taken a casual approach (at best) to the comfort and convenience of their passengers. Customers wouldn’t put up with similar service from a restaurant or a dry cleaner or the like, but because the airline business is so hard to get into (expensive planes, expensive booking systems, have to hire experienced pilots and mechanics and flight attendants and baggage handlers, hard to get into new airports and establish new routes, etc.) there aren’t many new entrants to the airline market who are challenging the existing players.
While your closing advice may be practical, J.D., it’s not what American consumers — especially business travelers — have come to expect. In general, consumers reward the companies that serve their needs best; in the case of airlines, they try to pick the best of a bad lot.
It will be interesting to see what impact consumer preferences will have on the airline business over the coming years — especially since groups representing frequent fliers are now lobbying hard in Washington to change the regulations under which the airlines current operate.
[...] terms the roots of the air-travel challenge. This may (only may) temper my ire the next time I rant about the poor business sense of most of the established players in the airline industry. But it convinces me more than ever that somebody — maybe a legislator, maybe an industry [...]
[...] earlier rants in this vein have included a call for sanity on the part of the airlines so that they can agree on some voluntary cap for how long planes will [...]