The airline industry profits by having you pay extra to be treated like a human being.
By Kali Holloway / AlterNet September 27, 2015
If you’ve ever seen those pictures of flight from the air industry’s “Golden Age” -- roughly the 1950s to the 1970s -- you know how hard it is to reconcile those images of spacious cabins, piano bars and in-flight freebies with today’s bare-bones, claustrophobic, no-free-lunch (or anything else) flight experiences. You might even say the discrepancy is a bit infuriating, especially considering that we’re in the midst of a boom time for airlines. In the three months of last quarter, America’s commercial airlines collectively made $5.5 billion, up 53 percent over the same period a year before and the highest tally since the pre-Recessionary days of 2007.
And yet, customers have never been more unhappy. The Air Travel Consumer Report from the U.S. Department of Transportation finds that in the first six months of this year, complaints from air travelers were up 20 percent over the same timeframe in 2014. It’s nothing short of confounding that as commercial airline profits and revenues skyrocket, customer service is worse than ever.
Confounding -- but not confusing -- when you consider airlines’ singular focus on their bottom lines. In an illuminating piece titled “Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer,” Columbia Law professor and New Yorker contributor Tim Wu posits that bad, no-frills service has become a cornerstone of the commercial airlines’ business strategy. “Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid,” Wu writes. “That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as ‘calculated misery.’ Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”
In other words, customer dissatisfaction pays off big for airlines. The industry figured out that if it only made flying a nightmarish experience for the average traveller -- one in which things like food and comfort come a la carte and at additional cost -- customers would pay extra for even the most basic of services. Airlines get to pretend that they’re offering customer choice, and passengers are duped into believing they’re spending more for premium service. It’s a case study in basic consumer psychology -- this tendency to pay more for less and then somehow think you’re getting a deal -- and airlines are capitalizing on it like never before.
Generally, if you are unhappy with a business, you may take yours elsewhere, but that’s no longer true for the air industry. Following a series of mergers over the last seven years, the New York Times finds that “80 percent of the nation’s air traffic is concentrated among four airlines -- American, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines.” An Econ 101 student with a low “C” in the class might’ve predicted those mergers would result in consumers getting screwed. But back in 2013, the Department of Justice Assistant Attorney for its antitrust division, General William J. Baer, defended the agency’s decision to allow an American Airlines-US Airways merger because it “open[ed] up the marketplace as never before.”
Two years later, as New York Magazine reported in June, the DOJ has launched its own investigation into America’s major airlines, which it suspects of collusion in order to bilk passengers out of billions. Per New York, “Investigators hope to find out whether these airlines let each other know about added flights and extra seats, in an effort to keep the number of open seats low and prices high.”
With the recent earnings announcement confirming airlines are profiting like crazy, it seemed like a good time to look at some of the many indignities visited upon travelers. And by every data-drive measure, things are pretty bad out there. So let’s get into it. Here are 10 of the Worst Indignities Airlines Regularly Subject Their Customers To.
1. Charging fees for checked baggage.
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2. Charging hefty fees for ticket changes.
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3. Being late.
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4. Booking (and often overbooking) flights.
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5. Expensive ticket prices.
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6. Limiting where you can buy tickets.
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7. Bundling services aka upselling you on pretty much everything.
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8. Boarding in the least efficient, most misery-causing ways possible.
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9. Seats that are small and getting smaller.
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10. Wi-fi on many flights stinks.
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Read all of the article...
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/10-ways-monopoly-airlines-use-calculated-misery-make-flying-increasingly
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