This is pretty funny. It's like a case study in the armchair expert. Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something, so they just started googling facts and figures, tried to find a trend, then looked for evidence to back up the trend they were looking for, then googled for "explanations" (read: news articles from mainstream media) to justify the trends they were looking for. At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry. Just a lot of googling, vague questions, and hand-wavey answers.
The weirdest part is how subjective the question is. It's like saying, is life getting worse? It turns out there's more than a few ways of looking at that. Air travel is cheap and widely available, despite coming out of a global pandemic, not to mention the global recession before that, among other minor blips. Oh, but you were delayed in getting in your magic metal tube that hurtles through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, letting you sip beer and watch movies in your PJs while traveling thousands of miles in a few hours, arriving safer than any other form of transportation? Man, that's terrible.
With air travel, and most kinds of tourism, and customer service, and actually with most commodified experiences, the affordability and mass availability is the thing that makes the experience subjectively worse. It's the other people. Farting. Coughing. When you treat people like animals, they act like animals. At the same time, when they act like animals, why not treat them as such?
Objectively and societally it may be better that more people have access to something, but by definition more people doing something makes it a shittier experience. No metrics or other dimensions necessary.
This doesn’t explain why the flexible compartment in front of me, on the back of the seats, is either less usable than 10 years ago (ie too inflexible), or doesn’t exist at all on some flights (Hello, Ryanair).
I think it's about improving the turnaround on planes. When a plane lands, the crew has to get everyone out, clean the cabin, then get the next flight's passengers in -- all as quickly as possible. The shorter this turnaround, the more flights the plane can fly, and the more money the airline can make.
Flexible seat back pockets are easy for people to stuff all kinds of trash in, so that's just one more task for the crew. Inflexible slots are harder to put trash in, and harder for passengers to notice there's trash in.
The problem with air travel is it is too fast. Or at least it is presented as fast. This implies if something is unpleasant, it shouldn't be a big deal because you shouldn't be exposed to it for long.
The on the ground part of flying has certainly gotten worse (honourable mention to Brexit). Which for flights of modest length is actually the longest part of the process. People keep coming up with creative ways of making it more painful.
Flying out of Cyprus was a good example, they have some crazy system where you have to print off a bit of paper at a kiosk to...well I really don't know what it did to be honest, verified your passport?
Not necessarily. It isn't the amount of people that is causing your discomfort -- the airline is always going to optimize for a full plane (and environmentally, we should want them to). It is the fact that we have been taught to tolerate people when they are being obnoxious and discourteous. If the airlines just ejected people who were being an asshole and fellow travelers would call out and shame bad behavior, it might lead to a more pleasant experience.
For the vast majority of folks who are or would be a nuisance in flight, I'm pretty sure:
* If they hear about stories where folks got punished for being obnoxious, they'd think "I would never be that obnoxious - that is not meant for people like me". In other words, they'be oblivious to their own predilections.
* If they are placed in a situation where their instincts would lead them to being obnoxious, they.. will be obnoxious. Even if they 'know' what the consequence are. There are a few reasons for that:
* It's a crime of passion; they can't help themselves. That's the general problem with trying to use rationality to tamper down crime: Most crimes are fundamentally not rational. You don't decide that it is in your best interest to murder someone (outside of an infinitesemal % of the population that are high functioning total psychopaths). No, you do so in the heat of the moment. At which point "Rational brain telling the id to cut it the fuck out because you might be ejected from the plane" is obviously going to have absolutely no tempering effect whatsoever.
* They honestly think it doesn't apply to them. Usually because 'yes of course obnoxious behaviour should be punished by ejecting the obnoxian from the plane. But I'm not obnoxious, you don't understand! That kid is crying and driving me nuts, I had a bad night's sleep, and I have an important meeting right out of the plane so I need my rest so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, see, my intentions are good!'
Ref: Bit of a stretch, but: Similar (in culture, size, average wage, etc) locations with wildly different takes on how important it is to punish crime in order to serve as a 'warning' / to disincentivise crime by making clear that it will be heavily punished. The best place in my experience to look for this is the US where it appears to be culturally in vogue to act as some sort of wild west sheriff trope. The results? Not one iota of difference in crime rates. Or, if anything, the places that punish it more have _more_ crime, not less. And, of course, a million-and-one psych papers.
If you want to make flight less of a nuisance, the rest of this thread has the right idea I think: Given that it's so ubiquitously available and intentionally designed in that way, it's inevitable that the experience sucks. If you want the experience to be less bad, it inherently comes with a reduction in accessibility.
And on top of that, 'travel stress' is real and not something the airline industry can easily tackle. Try to imagine that travel just stresses you out. That it just does. For those who don't suffer from travel stress this can be hard to do. Maybe you have a light fear of heights; channel that. It's easy to see how the experience just kinda sucks if half the people trying to enjoy the view from some high vantage point are lightly freaking out, and they kinda have to be there for other reasons.
The person you are replying to was alluding to the fact that 'ejecting' someone out of a plane that was flying would be a demonstration the crew's intolerance for obnoxiousness. In essence, if you don't behave you will be murdered. Seeing this happen to one passenger would almost certainly make everyone else on the flight quiet down and sit still.
In theory, yes, you could enforce better conduct (although this might harm the bottom line). But I also think that when you place people in cramped conditions, they inherently begin to behave more antisocially and become less amicable. For every inch of legroom or width you shave off a seat, I think there's a non-negligible amount of discomfort that leads to more annoyance, which in turn leads to worse behavior. At some point, some portion of the consumers do explode into outright hostility or madness, and the airlines mostly seem to be tuning their services to just above that point.
Money - the very high cost of any air travel prior to deregulation - used to somewhat alleviate both issues. The airlines had incentive to compete on service quality rather than chase the maximum number of seats they could pack on a plane. And anyone paying that much to fly had a reputational incentive to behave in a civilized way.
Flying private for the same amount of inflation-adjusted money as first class cost in the 1960s is a poor analogue, because it inherently leaves out the social dynamic that caused people to, e.g., wear their best clothes and don their best manners to board an airplane. There is no analogue, because first class now is not much better than what coach was back then. In other words, public air travel as it is now is a product that did not exist in the 1960s, geared to a consumer who didn't exist. And the enshittification is inevitable when the goal is maximum occupancy.
If there were an airline with double the legroom in coach for double the price of coach on other airlines, I'd fly it exclusively. No one offers that. It's a barbell with steerage at one end and a very diminished first class experience for 5x the price at the other.
Culture and behavior aren't strictly consequences of economics.
In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable, and respectful than one experiences on US flights, even though flights are still widely accessible in that region too, to my knowledge. Perhaps part of that is a side effect of reasonable train availability as well and distribution resulting from that (another great public utility we lack in the US because public good is bad or something)
> In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable,
This doesn't seem to be true at all in my experience. Nasty behavior or punches in planes in India is increasingly common. And it will get worse as more and more people travel by plane again due to "cheap tickets".
Not really. Very crowded airports and tight seating makes whole flying experience worse than before. Nothing to do with obnoxious people.
And cheap ticket price creates same incentive as cheap gas price. If its so cheap why not just travel more. One can argue "no one is forced to fly in plane" but living in society has taught me otherwise.
This too. All else being equal, if you doubled the price per flight and halved the number of passengers you crammed on a plane, you'd have less than half as many people flying and a lot fewer flights, hence a lot less pollution. My proof of this is that if it or equal value to double the price and halve the seats, some airline would be doing it.
I feel one key social dynamic is travel, tourism, exploring the world is relentlessly promoted as unalloyed good. Cities all over are falling over each other as great place to "explore" and "experience" much more than being good place to live, work or raise family.
If I see through this promotion I am the curmudgeon who doesn't love the joys of travel.
Why does he need to talk to someone in the travel industry to evaluate the experience of traveling? Yes, we all agree with Louis CK that just being able to fly is a marvel. But it still sucks and it has gotten worse.
It is news because a lot of people intuitively don't get this point. Also they would not show at 11 as news would rather be promoting more travel instead of covering downsides.
We had cheap airfare and significantly better passenger accommodation 20 years ago. For the most part folks didn't act like assholes in public either. So yeah, things have gotten worse.
Amd yet their conclusion at the start seems to nail it?
They say it's worse in terms of delays, cheaper, and safer. This all seems to be perfectly correct.
Rambling about for travel follows ...
I remember back in the 90s when a domestic flight was a major luxury for an upper middle class family. Now just about anyone with disposable income can afford it.
An economy ticket in the 90s was (roughly IIRC) equivalent to business class today in terms of service and first class in terms of price.
Yes, it's a lot cheaper. IMO if someone wants to experience 90s style travel they could upgrade to business or first class but there's a reason why most people don't.
Airlines have also gotten better at saving money on things that won't chase customers away. Delays are always a possibility so just having a better record on delays won't win many customers because they still need to manage the risk of delay. See also meals, seats, and every other thing people hate about air travel - there's always been unpleasant things about air travel, and making them a bit worse and a lot cheaper will win a lot more customers than it loses.
> Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something
> At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry.
Ignoring what conclusions they landed on, I'd like to defend this approach.
For a controversial subject, first party expertise or second party direct testimonials will have less weight than actual data and tangible trends.
We're having exceptional access to data, and I personally wish more people would go look for a topic they care about, gather facts and expose their conclusion.
An example of it is Sarah Marshall's essays on Tonya Harding [0] with 0 access, only interviews, police reports and news papers of the time. IMHO it's not competiting with expert analysis or new reporting, and bring a different kind of insight to the table.
I agree with your broader point. But I used to get a free beer on British Airways flights and no longer do. It's been many years since I flew on a plane with even a compartment for my stuff in front of me let alone a screen. Admittedly I fly less than I used to but that's at least partly because the relative experience vs cost of trains has got better and I have no reason to fly across the ocean.
With the way they pack people into airplanes like sardines, most of the reason for why "air travel sucks" today is that too many others are doing it!
It used to be FAR more common to get onto airplanes that were partially or even nearly totally empty. The extreme increase in efficiency/total flights combined with privatization means that every tom dick and harry is now flying/being a shitty tourist. I would nationalize all airline industries and I would have done it yesterday primarily because tom and dick should not be flying!
Americans have too much money. Too many low quality Americans (i.e the kind who cause negative stereotypes of Americans abroad) are now traveling who should have stayed home permanently.
Gate keeping is good and the "let people enjoy things" crowd is responsible for why a lot of stuff is now declining in this world.
Tourism is only fun when it's being done in small amounts. The locals of the "tourist dependent localities" certainly agree (and are often willing to take significant economic pain for the benefits of reducing the tourist load). Why not give them what they want for once???
I wonder how much of the increased schedule times are due to baggage fees? Here is my theory:
In 2008, airlines began charging for checked bags[1]. This was done both for the immediate revenue increase, and also to prod flyers into airline loyalty programs or airline credit cards to get a free checked bag. However, that caused a lot of casual fliers to go carryon-only. That, in turn, causes it to take longer to board/exit planes, leading to longer turn around times.
I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees. And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons. That would decrease the number of carryons and decrease the turnaround time.
EDIT: From the article "Starting around 2008, Scheduled flight times began increasing even faster than actual ones"
This has me convinced that the bag fees really torpedoed turnaround times.
Carry on policy has triggered an arms race for passengers and carry on size. I usually just bring a small backpack because it’s convenient and I don’t want to lug two bags through the airport.
Recently, certain airlines have announced that small bags must go under seats so there’s room in overhead storage for roller bags. There goes my leg room and any incentive to pack smaller with just one small backpack.
Now, I’m incentivized to bring the maximum size carry on so that I get overhead space and don’t have to shove smaller bags next to my feet.
Almost 45 years after my first flight, I still carry a backpack. The same one in fact, though its waterproofing is long gone.
More often than not, I get to stash it in the overhead bin. There's often space for something like 3-1/2 rollers in a bin, so I can squeeze my bag in. The option of putting it under my seat is something I save for strict necessity, but it's still preferable to gate-checking.
I need dire circumstances to travel with more than a backpack. Waiting for baggage claim drains my soul. Traveling with just a carry on means I can walk off the plane into a cab without further downtime.
I'm the opposite. I hate having to drag my lugguage around while I'm in the airport. I'm happy to wait for my baggage to be delivered. My life isn't so frantic that 10-15 minutes more is the end of the world.
I also don't see it as "downtime". I can check mail, message friends, call friends, read news, listen to podcasts or audio books, or music, all from my phone while I wait.
My most frequent flight lands at 11:50pm, and is often 30+ minutes late. The last thing I want is to spend my "down time" at 1am waiting 30+ minutes for my bag in an uncomfortable, loud, jarring space. I'd rather just take a backpack and already be in bed by the time my luggage would have shown up.
My wife is just the opposite, and always checks a giant bag. I get so irritated waiting for her bags and so stressed getting to the airport on time for them to take it -- another advantage of carryon only is that you can show up to the airport just-in-time, and you have one less unpredictable line to wait in. Carryon only + clear means I can show up to the airport 10 minutes before doors close and walk on the plane & not have to worry about lines, carry on space, waiting for luggage, etc.
I don't enjoy carrying my baggage around either, but I very much don't enjoy one extra line to stand in to check my bag, and after a long flight I very much don't enjoy having to wait even longer to get to my destination. It's not a matter of "downtime". I want to be to my hotel or house or whatever as soon as possible.
Due to airline status etc. I always have a free checked bag, but I never, ever use it.
I took some equipment once so figured I’d check my bag at the same time as I hard to wait for baggage anyway
Airline lost my bad, and took 5 days for it to arrive. Had no clothes, toiletries etc. to compound things there was then a hurricane and the shops were closed.
I’m team checked luggage. When plane lands, everyone is rushing out of airport, but I causally walk, perhaps grab some coffee or snacks before heading to baggage claim. It helps me relax and get energized for the driving.
Same, also a backpack simply does not have enough room for any trip longer than a couple of days. By the time you add underwear for every day, shirts for every day, multiple pairs of pants, some pajamas, toiletries... you're at a carry-on at least, and it's not hard to fill a checked bag.
It's not the waiting at the end that kills me, it's the waiting at the start.
When you need to check-in a bag, that's a whole situation. When you turn up at the airport with a backpack and a boarding pass in your Apple Wallet, now that is a nice way to start a trip.
Basically a non-descript nylon bag with minimal accoutrements. I curse its lack of features (extra pockets, etc) on every trip, then it goes on the shelf until the next trip. It was on sale at the local sporting goods store when I was in high school. I recently bought a cheap waterproof cover for it, because I noticed that most of the advertised "waterproof" packs come with a cover.
I have a very lightweight, tiny day pack that I either roll up and stuff in the main pack, or carry on as my "personal item." That way, I can leave the big pack in my hotel room.
I've had good luck waterproofing things with Nikwax. I've got a 20 year old Tom Bihn bag that I've applied it to as well as outdoor clothing and it's been great!
Airlines should get more strict with regards to the overhead bin. Both with bag size and placement. Planes can probably fit a certain sized bag for everyone who brings one, but too many flyers seem to intentionally bring bigger bags or place them oddly so as not to share the space.
In other words, it's too time consuming for flight attendants to do it for customers. Why? Because it's too time consuming.
All the more reason to remove disincentives from checking bags.
Honeestly the biggest reason I avoid checking bags is reliability. After you experience having a suitcase completely lost by an airline, it's hard to trust the system again.
Don't forget figuring out a way to tie overhead bin space to assigned seats to keep "overhead bin pirates" from storing their carryons in the front of the plane when their seats are in the back...
Wow another issue that comes down to "Airplanes are packed with too many people"
The FAA can force airlines to dedicate about 1.5X the amount of space per person that they do today, and all of these stupid problems disappear. Airlines could even get away with the skeleton crew of airline staff that they use today with the reduced amount of people who'd be paying more per seat.
But, because we have to let far too many people fly, and because the FAA doesn't stop private companies from violating human rights with their airplane seat designs, we have to deal with this lunancy where anyone 6 feet and above has to assume a struggle position for in some cases 20+ hours (i.e. flights to Singapore) in a fully packed metal coffin.
Or maybe someone 6 foot tall should just pay the more expensive ticket with larger leg room. Why should someone 5 foot tall pay for your comfort.
Same with seat width. The only issues there are when a minority of passengers are so large they take up your seat, they should be removed from the flight.
My theory is that the increased turnaround times are due to the fact that people are too stupid to board a plane properly. And Airline staff is doing less about it than, say, 10 years ago, probably being afraid of social media shitstorms or whatever.
I'm a frequent flyer, and the sheer carelessness of how people waste the time of everyone behind them in the boarding queue still surprises me. As if in the moment they reach their aisle they immediately forget they, too, were waiting...
I do not remember things to be so bad 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago. Some airline staff was quite active in herding the cattle back then, but also the cattle maybe was not as ignorant as today.
But maybe I am just becoming an old, grumpy man, and nothing has really changed. Who knows.
A bullet train holds 2x to 4x the passengers and loads in 2-5 minutes. I get they are very different. Those 2x to 4x passgeners load into 16 cars (so 16 doors). The baggage does not have to be stowed before take off nor do any cargo holds need to be loaded. The aisles are wider. Etc.
Still, as an example of the best possible case, it does make me wonder how much more efficient loading a plane could be. I can imagine some magic way to use all of the doors, even if in the short term it means walking on the tarmac to one of 4-6 stair cases.
Maybe it doesn't matter. I wonder if anyone has calculated if such a system would save (or lose) money.
The real limiting factor is the willingness of people to actually follow the system, which I think he mentions but doesn't examine much. It'd be interesting to see if any of the papers test the better systems to see how they fair with noncompliant passengers.
> And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons.
They have decided to be evil.
All low costs companies in Europe have been charging for carry ons since the end of Covid. You are only allowed a backpack which has to fit under the sit in front of you for free and adding carry ons is quite expensive, can be nearly as much as the ticket.
Classic airlines have started weighting carry ons before boarding too so it’s only a matter of time before they charge.
For a normal traveler and unless you do a very short trip, prices have actually significantly increased in the past few years.
I'm a _somewhat_ frequent flyer (5-8 trips a year). I've never experienced a plane being delayed by the time it take passengers to enter/exit the plane. I have, however, experienced delays because the baggage handlers are still loading the plane.
For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.
I don't think the claim is that boarding causes flights to depart later than scheduled. Of course they plan for the time it takes to board. The claim is that, despite being predictable, it significantly increases the turn-around time for airplanes.
If they’re not done loading the plane, they don’t have to make an announcement about it because it’s self evident, whereas if everyone is sitting down and ready to go, they will let everyone know what the holdup is.
Just yesterday I took a flight where they asked everyone to try to hurry up loading so they could get the plane off the ground sooner.
I've also been on flights where they asked us to hurry, and then we (flight attendants included) sat and waited for other things to be completed. Not saying that was what you experienced, of course! Nor am I complaining. My understanding is that gate attendants get penalized if they're the reason the plane is held up, so I understand why they'd play it safe and hurry people.
I'd love to see some hard data on this (I've tried to find it in the past, but there's so much fluff about this subject)!
I've often have the opposite experience. I fly a LOT (4+ times per month) and I hear the bag doors close and watch the handlers drive their ramp away while people are still staggering on-board more than 1/2 the time.
The article itself shows why scheduled times grew: so that airlines could report a very high percentage of on-time flights, which have regulatory and marketing advantages that they did not before.
Passengers preferred carry-on long before fees because checked bags take longer or get lost. I’m not aware of any data showing per-passenger load / unload times have increased.
Per-plane load / unload times have definitely increased, because the average passenger count per flight has increased. Bigger planes + fewer empty seats.
A very high percentage of on-time flights is an actual good thing and not just a reporting trick, even if all you have to change to achieve it is the reporting.
I agree 100% and when I encounter people that don't believe this theory I point out that, once upon a time, Southwest Airlines used to be able to turn an entire 737 in 10 minutes.
I agree, but it's worth noting that those 10 minute turns were probably -100 or -200 series aircraft with a capacity of about 100 passengers, while a modern Max-8/9/10 aircraft holds about 200 (who still board through a single door).
Is it possible this has anything to do with cheaper tickets and more amateur flyers? There are always some families new to flying that seem to gum up the works.
If that were the case I don’t think Southwest would ever have been record holders in turnaround time. Their tickets have historically been cheaper than many competitors.
The one advantage SW has is the open seating. People will naturally disperse along the length of the plane so as to avoid the middle seat. This could prevent many traffic jams that otherwise slow boarding with the rest of the passengers stuck behind a slow loader.
Not sure if it would actually make an impact -you will still get blockages. Would need a queuing theorist to comment.
We did SW once and never again. Some things we learned the hard way having never flown SW before: You have to pay extra if you don't want to be dead last on the plane, and evidently, everyone pays extra, because we were dead last. Not sitting together for sure (you have to pay extra for that too). So we finally get on the plane, and all the carry on space is already used up. We ask the flight attendant "so what now" and she just shrugs like it's my problem. I tell her OK we'll just leave the bags in the aisle then, or will you gate check them for us? Finally, she huffs and proceeds to open every overhead bin one by one until we find two of them with small backpacks that we have to yank down and convince the owners to stick under the seat in front of them. All the while the rest of the passengers are looking at us like we're preventing their ambulance from getting to the hospital.
No thanks. I'll take a slower boarding with a traditional airline that doesn't make their passengers feel like a burden.
It's insane how Southwest is willing to throw away a unique competitive edge that nobody else has, and their loyal customer base with it. It's also insane that the activist investors pressured them to do something that stupid. In one stroke Southwest went from being an airline worth going out of your way to fly, to just another airline which has to compete on price alone. Absolutely boneheaded move.
I intentionally chose Southwest for my last flight because the old policies -- included bags and free-form seating-- made me feel better about the experience. I didn't need the free checked bags, but I appreciated not being pressured into guessing exactly how many pairs of pants I'm going to need for a trip I booked 3 months in advance.
I know I'm not the industry's ideal customer-- taking solo tourist-class flights booked long in advance, once or twice a year, and not churning frequent flyer points, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated with contempt.
To be honest, that feels like an entire direction the travel sector needs to focus on. I'm paying hundreds of dollars to sit in your lowest-bid Metal Death Tube or stay in your Totally Not A Bedbug Sanctuary, stop treating me like a transient who walked into a Rodeo Drive boutique because I don't have Triple Ytterbium Status.
The number of SWA customers who needed wheelchairs to board (earlier than able-bodied pax) and were healed enough mid-flight to be able to walk off at the destination was astounding. It’ll be sad to lose all those miraculous recoveries.
For those not familiar with Southwest Airlines, they famously offered two free checked bags for years after all other major carriers started charging for them. Sadly, they ended that practice earlier this year.
Honestly I'd love to check bags more often, but it's too frequently an inordinately slow and risky proposition.
I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.
Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.
If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.
United already charges for carryons (the basic-economy fare only includes items small enough to fit under the seat), and if you bring one they charge you more than the checked bag fee to gate-check it.
The budget carriers in Europe (RyanAir, EasyJet, etc) all have fees for carry on bags that are almost as high as checked bags and they only even offer those fees to people who have purchased the “up front” premium seats.
They board and deboard planes insanely quickly. Just about the only good thing about those airlines is that they are super dedicated to on-time operations and not wasting time. They can’t afford to waste any time when they’re offering $25 international flights.
Of course, not having 9 boarding groups of various status levels helps a lot too.
I also experienced recently that gate agents will lie about this to decrease turn around time if a plane is running late. We were forced to gate check ours after being told the plane was too full to hold all, only to get onboard and find ample space. When we asked the flight attendant, they apologized and said they did not tell them to do this, but it’s unfortunately common at airports with frequent delays. So charge ridiculous bag fees, forcing everyone to carry on, which delays boarding, so they lie to you and check your bag for free (which maybe you would’ve done to begin with if that was an option), only to board a plane and feel duped. All around great experience!
> I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees.
I agree, but I think another big incentive for people to bring carryons is how the airlines deal with checked baggage. All too often you have to wait forever to collect your bags, or your bag gets damaged, or your bag gets lost (usually not permanently).
With checked bag fees, the airlines took one of the worst aspects of their own service and started charging more for it. And they wonder why nobody wants to check a bag.
If airlines took checked bags seriously I'd check bags more often -- even if I had to pay to check them.
How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought? Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate, and I'd imagine that would further slow things down, require more staff etc. Just don't think either thing will happen, since clearly they care a lot more about making money than passenger convenience.
Ryanair already does this in the UK and Frontier does it in the US, so clearly someone has figured out the logistics of it. Both are ultra-low cost carriers (in the same model as Southwest used to be).
As for payments slowing down boarding: I expect that it does, but the price info I see online suggests that the carryon fees are punitive (more than checked baggage, and with a 100% surcharge for paying at the gate). In other words, the purpose of the fee is more about discouraging people from bringing a carryon in the first place than the revenue it generates.
Frontier doesn't seem to be shy about reminding customers about the gate pay surcharge, either.
For the record, As a carry-on lover and cheapskate, I viscerally dislike this idea. But your logistical objections don't ring true to me.
> How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought?
Simple. Charge for the right to put a suitcase in the overhead bins. If it can fit under the seat in front of you, in the seat pocket, or if you can wear it, then no problem.
> Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate
The flight attendants already have the ability to say "sorry, you need to check that" if the bins are full or if an item is too big, and then get the item where it needs to go. They already have the ability to charge your card with a handheld reader if you want to order special food items. I'm failing to see the obstacle here.
Spirit already does this. You need a special ticket to be allowed to carry on more than a personal item. I've seen people stopped and forced to pay an exorbitant punishment fee to take on a bag when they hadn't purchased a carry on in advance.
They already have the "infrastructure" to prevent one person from bringing on two carry-ons or a carry-on that exceeds the size requirements. I'm not sure what new thing you're imagining they would need.
you're currently allowed a carry-on and a "personal item" like a purse or a small backpack. the carry-on can be stowed, but the personal item has to stay with you in the seat.
getting rid of the carry-on doesn't mean no personal item, it just means you aren't allowed any space in the overhead bin.
I should be entitled to the same amount of space, carry-on space and under seat space, as every other passenger paying for the same class of ticket.
If I chose to not bring two items (or three, or four, as many passengers do because there is no enforcement of rules), I should get to place it in the overhead bins and not have to cramp my feet.
The budget airlines have all started getting very strict with carry ons. If your ticket has not paid for the larger carry on size they make you put your bag in the sizing basket and dont let you on if it doesnt fit. There is also a smaller basket for the personal item so you cant just bring a ton of food bags.
Anecdotally, Southwest flights now take much longer to board because of the stupid checked luggage fee they just introduced.
I’d pay $60 more per flight just to not have to deal with other people screwing with giant carry on bags, and the repeated announcements that there’s no room in the overhead compartments.
As a bonus, they also set the sizes for checked luggage slightly below industry standards. Good luck finding something close to but below their linear inch limit. I figured this out because instead of checking three small bags, the family now checks one that’s right up to the weight + size limit.
They used to be the best domestic airline (due to enshittification with all the other carriers), and also one of the cheapest. They could have just raised ticket prices by $50 on average and still have been one of the cheapest.
Instead of realizing they were the premium choice, they’re racing to become one of the worst airlines. They even recently announced they’re going to charge extra for legroom early next year.
I wonder how much it will cost them to move the seats around so some of them have inadequate legroom, and how many rows that’ll add.
Anyway, yes, flights have gotten much worse in the last ten years.
> I’d pay $60 more per flight just to not have to deal with other people screwing with giant carry on bags, and the repeated announcements that there’s no room in the overhead compartments.
It’s been awhile since I’ve boarded less than Group 4 on Delta. But I don’t remember it being that bad even with group 5 - Silver medallion, credit card holders and economy travel.
A lot of pathology in air travel is related to the fact that people use aggregate search engines to find flights and sort by price. The lowest up-front base fare tends to win. So that encourages airlines to nickel and dime later, such as by charging for bags and a million other things, making the whole experience worse.
If the whole price had to be flat and bundled into the ticket the experience would be better.
It's also an industry that competes on price, and that tends toward a spiral to the bottom in quality. They aren't allowed to skimp too much on safety stuff, and if they did it'd cost more in the long run, but they are incentivized to make seats tiny and uncomfortable and nickel and dime.
Airlines have either lost my checked bag or just stolen from it too many times for me to trust them with my possessions again. Maybe if I was transporting horse manure, or unpackaged glitter.
Every single statistic I’ve seen shows that lost luggage happens around 1% of the time. We fly fairly frequently - on average more than once per month and it’s really not something we think about.
My personal experience is I've had my luggage lost twice in the last 10 years at an average of 6 flights per year, so my personal incidence rate seems to be 2%
You ever try to mail something to or from a developing or semi developed country? You'll be lucky if you ever see it again, let alone have to deal with import controls.
You can put the toothbrush in your laptop bag. Although I don't know why you're buying toothbrushes with lithium batteries in them. Even if electric toothbrushes made sense that's still a waste of money compared to the disposable ones.
And no, it's not just a laptop bag. The list of things with batteries in our daily life is huge, and telling people to skip it just so that you can get on a plane a bit faster isn't reasonable.
Maybe in aggregate flights have fewer delays but every single flight I’ve taken this year has been delayed (on top of the padded flight times the article mentions). I’ve flown about half a dozen trips.
I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem. Airlines have exclusivity on airport gates. Any frequent flier on the SFO -> EWR route knows that if you want to save money you can book an Alaska flight instead of United but Alaska has significantly fewer gates and usually gets delayed when arriving waiting for one. Flights aren’t exactly equal commodities and even if the airlines were well-run, contracts for these gates are locked in.
Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
Perhaps the free market is solving the pricing/timeliness problem, but your fellow travelers value lower prices more than being on time?
> Business class prices on
> tickets have skyrocketed
The people with more disposable income who are subsidizing air travel for the rest of us are giving us an even larger subsidy these days? I feel just terrible about that.
It’s not that simple. Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers, so airlines are increasing the % of business class seating, leaving fewer seats for economy seating and therefore less availability in economy, so you might not even end up seeing the savings in your flight ticket since more economy passengers are competing with each other.
They're degrading economy to the point where people feel like they have to upgrade. I'm not that tall or large but I can no longer tolerate American's economy seating, my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me before they recline, it's down right painful if they choose to recline.
Live in DFW, which is an American hub and my largest option for direct flights and flight availability in general which is why I mention them
Business class tickets are bought by companies not people. You pay for that "subsidy" through more expensive products to pay for that exec's stupid flight to a symposium where they all talk about how great they are and how important their ideas are.
Every time I've flown First/Business class, it's been out of my own pocket. Every time I've had my employer pay for a flight, it's been in cattle class.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
I fly frequently on average more than once a month and I really don’t see the benefit of first class for domestic flights. I am short though. I’m good with exit row seats.
We aren’t budget travelers and we have been on a plane for leisure 12+ times a year since 2021. We are both Platinum Medallion on Delta and get automatic C+ upgrades at time of booking and enjoy our lounge access (via credit cards).
Domestic at least, I expect a lot is upgrades for status travelers (who have flown a lot of it on company expense accounts). At least that's my experience.
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
I think the average flyer can be pretty confident that they're saving more on the flight than the incremental addition to their grocery bills attributable to company executives' flight costs...
YUP! As usual HN downvotes the truth! I have NEVER seen a business who is willing to let people actually travel in business class outside of the C suite and even then I've seen them refuse it for C suite!!!
This includes for people making 500K+ a year. Still forced to sit in coach unless they pay out of pocket.
Normies ruined business class. Can't get business class tickets on international flights for anything less than 10X and often more like 20X the price of economy. It should be no more than 4X.
> Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
Sure, but business class is still 100% full (and frequent fliers complain that they aren't getting upgrades, so it seems to be mostly paid).
This is like when companies complain that they can't find any good devs, but don't want to pay market rate.
> I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem.
It's odd that in his rush to point the finger at the government monopoly, he seems to have missed that a free market where customers select flights mostly on price naturally tends towards airlines operating lower cruise speeds for better operating economy, and not allowing loads of wiggle room in their schedules to make up for delays.
The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
> The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
Well... I mean, objectively, there are not enough ATCs. Staff are being scheduled 6 days a week. Towers at small airports are operating on reduced hours because there aren't enough people, and towers are some airports are being operated with less than full staff (so each person is working multiple tasks).
Whether or not the very real staff shortage is what is causing the delays is not 100% clear. My intuition is that it is, but I don't have any actual data to support that.
Ground delays due to ATC staffing shortages are real. It’s not a secret, statistics about it are kept.
Off the top of my head, it is has affected Austin, Newark and most major destinations in Canada this year. That is not an exhaustive list by any means.
They're real and tracked, but they're also not the main reason why airlines aren't on time, or any sort of reason for lower cruise speeds.
We've got percentages for delays attributed to the National Aviation System (including those for reasons other than ATC understaffing, like congestion management) here[1], it's less than half of those attributed to the carrier, with a slight trend fall. That doesn't mean ATC understaffing isn't a problem (patching gaps in shift patterns is bad for a whole bunch of safety related reasons, for a start), it means that the author is dead wrong that airlines won't do anything to jeopardise on time performance and government must be the only bottleneck.
[1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/inf...
Lower speeds to save on fuel as closing on sound barrier has somewhat sharp increase in air resistance.
Also I think in general increasing utilization of aeroplanes increases revenues and thus makes things more profitable as money is not made while not flying. Easiest way to achieve this is to remove slack like shortening turnover times. Which then results in cascading delays as planes simply are not available at times.
Why does Alaska schedule more flights than they have gate slots? Or is it just that anything that delays gate availability is going to impact them first?
May also happens to be the month construction began on one of EWR’s two commonly used runways (though they do have a smaller third runway). This severely reduced the amount of traffic the airport could handle and EWR attempted to keep operating the same amount of scheduled flights as usual, it was a real mess.
How have we not solved the issue of getting everyones baggage off the plane in a timely manner. We've been using these conveyor belt-carousels for over 50 years and the same process for loading and unloading, but people shouldnt have to plan on waiting 45+ minutes after they deplane for their personal belongings in 2025. Lost luggage? The whole system seems archaic to me.
Alaska guarantees bags within 20m of landing. It’s not impossible, most airlines just don’t give a shit because people tend to mentally blame the airport not the airline for baggage experience issues.
If you think about the complexity of routing bags from a single plane on to potentially dozens of connecting flights and onto the non-connecting carousel, it's actually amazing that the process is not screwed up more frequently.
1. the airfare inflation chart is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI which is calculated differently from the other metrics in the article; it does take into account routes popularity.
2. today’s average Economy ticket is different from the 1990s ticket: meals, seat pitch, seat selection, baggage. service changed to the point that 1990 Standard Economy is more similar to 2025 Premium Economy.
There's something off about blaming mass availability and low prices for poor travel experiences.
My poor travel experiences are due to airlines lying about delays and having inadequate resources to deal with the problems that led to those delays.
The trade-off isn't that there are men in cargo shorts on my flight because it's cheap, it's at the airline will strand you in some hell hole and won't pick up the phone for hours.
According to my own limited experience, yes, it is getting worse.
Airlines cut their costs hard during covid, but never undid most of those changes after covid was over. So now you have non-low-cost airlines that charge extra for luggage, for example. Or not provide a meal during a 5-hour flight. Or flight schedules so bad that booking sites insist that the best option to get form one European capital to another, with only constraint that you need to get there in the evening of a particular day, is 3 separate flights taking 2/3 of that day.
I will say I've been on a number of flights that left late but arrived early/on-time. I think they build a pad into flight time and/or give up fuel efficiency to make up time.
There was an article posted to HN recently (today, even!) that showed how airlines do pad their flight times deliberately.
I think it's reasonable. Even if you depart the gate on time, there could be things out of the airliners' control that cause delays, such as a long queue to take off.
Air travel is a mixed bag. Inflight entertainment systems, free Wi-Fi (for at least messaging), better airports etc. try to reduce the hassle the system has introduced over the years. But also, the number of personal flights that are delayed by more than an hour was concerning in the recent days. The stipulated times were only a suggestion, and the real time depends pretty much on factors that almost nobody has any control on. The schedules for flights have become so tight that only a perfect world without inconsistencies can handle that dense a network. Throw in the climate change, and it is expected.
Budget airlines is Europe have figured out an evil approach to avoiding delays.
Airlines are eligible to pay compensation for delays longer than two hours. So they start boarding the aircraft 1.5 hrs after departure, close the doors at the 2 hour mark and then spend the next hours sitting on the tarmac while depriving the passengers of food and drink.
This strategy would save them having to issue food vouchers at the airport, but not delay compensation per se which is based on arrival time at the destination gate.
Or even worse, they load all the passengers into a bus and... just leave them there for an hour or so. And of course the buses are packed with most passengers standing.
The airlines tend to avoid paying compensation by making the whole processes as confusing as possible. What the rules actually say has less affect on the outcome than you might expect.
Not captured in numbers or the article, but I've noticed service becoming a lot poorer, though perhaps the downward trend has stopped for now. Between 2021-2024 or so, I encountered a lot of people working for airlines (gate agents, flight attendants, etc.) who really went out of their way to make me feel like they're doing me a favor by letting me fly on their plane.
That's not to say that the average airline worker is like that; it just seemed like the bottom fell out, so that the floor on what my worst experience could be while flying became substantially worse compared to times before.
Flying before every country dropped covid restrictions was really just a degree of bliss that I'll never again attain in my life. Tickets at rock bottom prices, booking just one seat but having a full row to stretch out and sleep on, nobody in front of or behind me, meals being oddly good for some reason (maybe desperate to appeal to customers or not needing to make as many meals with little ingredients?). 2020-2023 was peak travel.
Economic inefficiency can feel really good. Personally experiencing tens of billions of dollars of capital investment designed for a capacity 50x as high, temporarily priced way below what it should be due to a market shock? Sign me up!
I’ll never forget going on a business trip where the restrictions were in place on the way there and had dropped by the time of my return flight.
I was so mad.
I flew probably 30 times during covid restrictions, and as you say, it was absolute bliss. That return flight reminded me why flying was miserable before COVID restrictions and is miserable now.
Less than half-full planes were very frequent prior to the big airline mergers in the 2010's. The loss of US Air, Contentintal, and Air Tran has completely ruined air travel. On most domestic flights, the middle seat was for children or unoccupied.
In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers, and it seems like it might actually be deeper than that (extending throughout young people's attitudes towards their jobs).
Quite right, I'm sure. But the part that I'm more interested about is why it feels like the floor got so much lower? I don't know that the average interaction in public (in any context, not just flying) is any or substantially worse, but it seems like the variation to the downside got more extreme.
Young people feel (either really or they have been convinced) that employers don't care about them, pay them slave wages, and will generally abuse them so they feel the same way in return -- no loyalty, no care other than getting the next paycheck.
If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.
I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
The employer/employee relationship is basically by definition transactional.
SOME employers do reward hard work and going above-and-beyond, but it's becoming more and more rare.
The simple fact is, giving raises and promoting top performers is not good for shareholder value.
> benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty
The company I work at just laid off ~100 people. One was from my team and was a great worker that took on additional responsibilities and worked extra hours to get things done. Still got let go. How's that for rewarding loyalty?
> In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers
This hasn't been my experience at all. And to be quite frank, whenever I see someone claim this, my cynical misanthropic brain assumes that's what's ACTUALLY happening is that customers are asking for exceptions beyond policy that customer service personnel can't give them and then claim they're getting poor service or that the customer service rep was rude for telling them "no" on something.
I worked retail and fast food for over 10 years. People suck. And while I got out of that industry 13 years ago, I know that people have only gotten worse. People demand the world and then complain about poor service when they don't get it.
Some people suck so much that the average works out to "suck".
It doesn't help that it's a weighted average. The people who don't suck tend to require fairly little time. (In fact, many of them may well suck, too, but you don't have time to notice.) The people who suck a lot always require a lot of your time.
As a teenager, I worked at a big box store that figured out how to monetize this: The department I worked in had a blank on the pricing form marked "Hand Placement Fee" that our company trainer taught us to call the "PIA Charge"
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
I suspect this is employee burnout from repeatedly seeing their coworkers laid off and being told to "do more with less."
The airlines -- like all other MBA-run businesses now -- are titrating their services: They cut staff and pay and quality until customers start to loudly complain or leave and then they restore just enough staff or quality until the shouting stops.
They do this repeatedly in a closed feedback loop. Any CEO that doesn't work this way in the modern era gets fired.
I was in Italy recently and got chatting to one of the airport employees. She said she'd been working in airlines/airports for 20 years and it was fucked as a career because wages were decreasing, hours increasing, shifts getting less predictable, career/permanent staff being replaced by agency workers/temps and she had run out of fucks to give.
As a career, working in aviation is extremely hierachical and seniority based. If you're old, chances are you started making an okay amount of money and now are making absolute bank. Years of collective agreements and contracts have seniority king. If you're a new employee though it seems to be really shitty. The system is entirely tipped against you.
This is one of the hot button topics, but I was surprised to see the (false) reference to the FAA having race and gender quotas.
This was suggested to me six months ago by someone who was extreme right wing, (going as far as to say that the FAA only hired non-white employees) and I found the claims bizarre enough to research on my own. They claimed that this was a known fact, whether you read left or right news sources, but when I did my research (not on bias, but on actual hiring results), it said that historically, the FAA has been about 90% white, and currently is about 70% white (IIRC), which is a far cry from suggesting that the FAA has race and gender quotas.
Again, here, the article makes the same claim, but this time with a citation (!), so I wondered if there was some truth to it, that I missed, earlier, but again, the truth does not pan out. It seems that a few members of the NBCFAE (National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) stepped over the line in their attempts to to change hiring practices that were preventing black candidates from being considered (going from increasing the diversity of the candidate pool, which is laudable, to discriminating in order to change up the racial mix, which is illegal).
However, in all of this, it's not the FAA acting, just a few powerful individuals from the NBCFAE. That doesn't change the fact that something bad happened, just the characterization of it ends up being completely misleading.
Airfare alone isn’t a great indicator of price, since airlines have been reducing benefits—luggage generally is an upcharge now, whereas it used to be built into the ticket price.
They are very guilty of shrinkflation in general. For example, first class used to get you access to the airport lounges. Now you need a very expensive subscription of some sort to get access.
Lounges have gotten significantly worse since Covid though with overcrowding issues (with some exceptions like KIX), so I don’t think it’s a particularly great loss. My card lets me pay some token amount to gain access to lounges but I’d rather spend that money to get an actual meal cooked for me rather than a buffet and then sit in a quiet corner of the terminal than a crowded lounge.
This varies: a family member of mine flew cross-country a few weeks ago first class (on the company's dime) and was given automatic access to the lounges there.
International first class / business class travel is a different category than domestic. I was just referring to domestic. It usually costs an order of magnitude more so there are still some decent perks associated with it.
Transcontinental flights often qualify when shorter ones would not. If your flight has lay-flat seats (I usually fly Delta, so think Delta One), your ticket for one of those will usually cover the lounges. Whereas a standard domestic first-class ticket does not.
But then again, these short flights are often CHEAP. Even in “first”, where the perk is…a wider chair, sitting near the front and better snacks i suppose.
Example: I can fly from NYC to Chicago for $80 in economy. In first it’s about $200 on delta. I certainly wouldn’t expect free access to a good lounge with decent food for free at that price. It would be hard for me to be disappointed as a flyer at those prices.
A 45L backpack ("personal item") and a 50L duffle bag (carry-on) give you a huge amount of space sufficient for pretty much any travels on the cheapest ticket.
Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
Although, this seems to apply only to hardshell wheeled cases - I walked aboard with my backpack & shoulder bag without any issues, and fit my backpack into an overhead compartment and shoulder bag under my seat with no problems.
But next time, I may try to pack everything into a single backpack, and re-configure things once I'm in my seat so I have easy access to a smaller subset of stuff in my shoulderbag instead.
> Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
I don't think this is that unreasonable. Gate staff can look around and count how many bags people have, and they know how much space is in the overhead bins. Not to mention that nearly every flight will run out of overhead space, so they might as well start demanding people check bags sooner rather than later.
Though the overhead bin space probably wouldn't be as bad if airlines were better about enforcing size limits. So often, a roller bag is just an inch or two too tall, so has to be placed lengthwise in the overhead bin, making it take up space that could have fit 2-3 bags.
If I see that happening and I'm traveling light enough, I've merged my backpack into my duffle bag so that I have one single "personal item" for under the seat in front of me. Nobody ever seems to care that it doesn't cleanly fit.
But jeez, forcing check-ins during Group 1 is worse than I've ever seen it. I guess it's more and more popular to use two hard-shell carry-ons and put them into the overhead compartment. And I guess the airline just sees it as an incentive for you to buy a more expensive seat.
This is a good move anyway, as the overhead bins fill rapidly but you can always count on your under-seat space. And if you do find space overhead, you have a bit more room to stretch your legs with nothing filling in that space.
I do this all the time on Alaska. I have the same Peak Design travel backpack as a sibling comment mentioned, plus an ordinary overhead roller suitcase. Maybe one in five times I have to gate-check the suitcase, but the rest of the time I have ~90L of space carried on and off the plane.
How is it inconsiderate? The suitcase goes in the overhead where I'm taking up no more space than any other passenger, the backpack fits under the seat in front of me. It squashes my legs a bit, but the only person getting inconvenienced there is myself.
I usually travel with my wife & 3 kids, and ... yeah, none of those things will work. I might still be able to fit my youngest in that backpack, I don't think she could wear one (She might be a bit too big now).
The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs. I'm glad you feel lucky about that.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
> The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs
And at the end of the day, operates at a pre-tax[1] profit margin of 5% (in a good year), or 0% in a bad one.
If all airlines became altruistic non-profit entities tomorrow that only exist to serve their customers and nobody else, your ticket prices wouldn't drop more than ~$10-20.
[1] Post-tax, it's at 2.5%, but I'm not qualified to get into whether or not there's Hollywood accounting going on.
It's tricky tho cos Emirates B777 in Economy is not great so does depend on whether the route you're flying is guaranteed to have a A380. Flew them recently where one leg was A380 and the other B777, and could not be A380 for both legs.
Southwest is a public company. Elliott Investment Management owns 11% of southwest. Elliot is a hedge fund, not private equity, but thats semantics. More importantly, Elliot purchased its position in direct response to the holiday meltdown in 2022. Im not a southwest flier, but it seems their problems started before the capital moved in.
My air fares in Europe ha stayed shockingly stable. My home base is in Vienna and my trips have stayed stable. Which is impressive if you consider inflation and energy prices.
We have no idea how much that CO2 will cost to remove since we don't have the technology, and that is assuming that we need to remove it, so I don't understand why you think that is "way too cheap"?
Go read the union agreement between united american airlines pilots and united airlines if you want something infuriating.
We could have much lower prices and operating under the same federal safety guidelines, but rich ass pilots are exploiting collective bargaining to keep their salaries unbelievably high when they don't need to be.
It's said here [0] that they make an average of $160,970 a year.
That's not... rich, not in 2025. That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich. And then you have to take into account the fact that these pilots are away from home quite often, and have dozens, if not hundreds, of lives in their hands when they do their jobs, and that makes me think they're fairly compensated for doing the actual labor that the company needs to operate. Meanwhile, the CEOs make more in a year than most Americans will make in an entire lifetime [1]. And that's not even getting into some of the dividends that airlines pay people who just happen to possess a piece of paper.
> That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich.
I agree that's not exactly rich, but that's a damn sight more than "comfortable". That's really good money. I'm not even saying that's the problem with air travel like GP claimed, but let's not pretend that $160k isn't a great salary. That's more than I make as a principal systems engineer in the tech industry!
> That's more than I make as a principal systems engineer in the tech industry!
No offense to you or any other engineers, but I actually think the pilot who is responsible for hundreds of lives per flight should make more than us software folks.
The weirdest part is how subjective the question is. It's like saying, is life getting worse? It turns out there's more than a few ways of looking at that. Air travel is cheap and widely available, despite coming out of a global pandemic, not to mention the global recession before that, among other minor blips. Oh, but you were delayed in getting in your magic metal tube that hurtles through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, letting you sip beer and watch movies in your PJs while traveling thousands of miles in a few hours, arriving safer than any other form of transportation? Man, that's terrible.
Objectively and societally it may be better that more people have access to something, but by definition more people doing something makes it a shittier experience. No metrics or other dimensions necessary.
Flexible seat back pockets are easy for people to stuff all kinds of trash in, so that's just one more task for the crew. Inflexible slots are harder to put trash in, and harder for passengers to notice there's trash in.
Flying out of Cyprus was a good example, they have some crazy system where you have to print off a bit of paper at a kiosk to...well I really don't know what it did to be honest, verified your passport?
Even a villain is the hero in their own story.
For the vast majority of folks who are or would be a nuisance in flight, I'm pretty sure:
* If they hear about stories where folks got punished for being obnoxious, they'd think "I would never be that obnoxious - that is not meant for people like me". In other words, they'be oblivious to their own predilections.
* If they are placed in a situation where their instincts would lead them to being obnoxious, they.. will be obnoxious. Even if they 'know' what the consequence are. There are a few reasons for that:
* It's a crime of passion; they can't help themselves. That's the general problem with trying to use rationality to tamper down crime: Most crimes are fundamentally not rational. You don't decide that it is in your best interest to murder someone (outside of an infinitesemal % of the population that are high functioning total psychopaths). No, you do so in the heat of the moment. At which point "Rational brain telling the id to cut it the fuck out because you might be ejected from the plane" is obviously going to have absolutely no tempering effect whatsoever.
* They honestly think it doesn't apply to them. Usually because 'yes of course obnoxious behaviour should be punished by ejecting the obnoxian from the plane. But I'm not obnoxious, you don't understand! That kid is crying and driving me nuts, I had a bad night's sleep, and I have an important meeting right out of the plane so I need my rest so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, see, my intentions are good!'
Ref: Bit of a stretch, but: Similar (in culture, size, average wage, etc) locations with wildly different takes on how important it is to punish crime in order to serve as a 'warning' / to disincentivise crime by making clear that it will be heavily punished. The best place in my experience to look for this is the US where it appears to be culturally in vogue to act as some sort of wild west sheriff trope. The results? Not one iota of difference in crime rates. Or, if anything, the places that punish it more have _more_ crime, not less. And, of course, a million-and-one psych papers.
If you want to make flight less of a nuisance, the rest of this thread has the right idea I think: Given that it's so ubiquitously available and intentionally designed in that way, it's inevitable that the experience sucks. If you want the experience to be less bad, it inherently comes with a reduction in accessibility.
And on top of that, 'travel stress' is real and not something the airline industry can easily tackle. Try to imagine that travel just stresses you out. That it just does. For those who don't suffer from travel stress this can be hard to do. Maybe you have a light fear of heights; channel that. It's easy to see how the experience just kinda sucks if half the people trying to enjoy the view from some high vantage point are lightly freaking out, and they kinda have to be there for other reasons.
Even without any of the reasons you mentioned I shouldn’t have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, the flight attendant should.
I’d pay 50% more for any flight where it’s the flight attendant’s job to make people and their kids shut the hell up.
Wouldn’t you?
Money - the very high cost of any air travel prior to deregulation - used to somewhat alleviate both issues. The airlines had incentive to compete on service quality rather than chase the maximum number of seats they could pack on a plane. And anyone paying that much to fly had a reputational incentive to behave in a civilized way.
Flying private for the same amount of inflation-adjusted money as first class cost in the 1960s is a poor analogue, because it inherently leaves out the social dynamic that caused people to, e.g., wear their best clothes and don their best manners to board an airplane. There is no analogue, because first class now is not much better than what coach was back then. In other words, public air travel as it is now is a product that did not exist in the 1960s, geared to a consumer who didn't exist. And the enshittification is inevitable when the goal is maximum occupancy.
If there were an airline with double the legroom in coach for double the price of coach on other airlines, I'd fly it exclusively. No one offers that. It's a barbell with steerage at one end and a very diminished first class experience for 5x the price at the other.
In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable, and respectful than one experiences on US flights, even though flights are still widely accessible in that region too, to my knowledge. Perhaps part of that is a side effect of reasonable train availability as well and distribution resulting from that (another great public utility we lack in the US because public good is bad or something)
This doesn't seem to be true at all in my experience. Nasty behavior or punches in planes in India is increasingly common. And it will get worse as more and more people travel by plane again due to "cheap tickets".
And cheap ticket price creates same incentive as cheap gas price. If its so cheap why not just travel more. One can argue "no one is forced to fly in plane" but living in society has taught me otherwise.
I feel one key social dynamic is travel, tourism, exploring the world is relentlessly promoted as unalloyed good. Cities all over are falling over each other as great place to "explore" and "experience" much more than being good place to live, work or raise family.
If I see through this promotion I am the curmudgeon who doesn't love the joys of travel.
They say it's worse in terms of delays, cheaper, and safer. This all seems to be perfectly correct.
Rambling about for travel follows ...
I remember back in the 90s when a domestic flight was a major luxury for an upper middle class family. Now just about anyone with disposable income can afford it.
An economy ticket in the 90s was (roughly IIRC) equivalent to business class today in terms of service and first class in terms of price.
Yes, it's a lot cheaper. IMO if someone wants to experience 90s style travel they could upgrade to business or first class but there's a reason why most people don't.
Airlines have also gotten better at saving money on things that won't chase customers away. Delays are always a possibility so just having a better record on delays won't win many customers because they still need to manage the risk of delay. See also meals, seats, and every other thing people hate about air travel - there's always been unpleasant things about air travel, and making them a bit worse and a lot cheaper will win a lot more customers than it loses.
> At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry.
Ignoring what conclusions they landed on, I'd like to defend this approach.
For a controversial subject, first party expertise or second party direct testimonials will have less weight than actual data and tangible trends.
We're having exceptional access to data, and I personally wish more people would go look for a topic they care about, gather facts and expose their conclusion.
An example of it is Sarah Marshall's essays on Tonya Harding [0] with 0 access, only interviews, police reports and news papers of the time. IMHO it's not competiting with expert analysis or new reporting, and bring a different kind of insight to the table.
https://www.thebeliever.net/remote-control/
I'm not sure I've ever seen this as a pejorative for doing research to come up with sources for data before.
It used to be FAR more common to get onto airplanes that were partially or even nearly totally empty. The extreme increase in efficiency/total flights combined with privatization means that every tom dick and harry is now flying/being a shitty tourist. I would nationalize all airline industries and I would have done it yesterday primarily because tom and dick should not be flying!
Americans have too much money. Too many low quality Americans (i.e the kind who cause negative stereotypes of Americans abroad) are now traveling who should have stayed home permanently.
Gate keeping is good and the "let people enjoy things" crowd is responsible for why a lot of stuff is now declining in this world.
Tourism is only fun when it's being done in small amounts. The locals of the "tourist dependent localities" certainly agree (and are often willing to take significant economic pain for the benefits of reducing the tourist load). Why not give them what they want for once???
In 2008, airlines began charging for checked bags[1]. This was done both for the immediate revenue increase, and also to prod flyers into airline loyalty programs or airline credit cards to get a free checked bag. However, that caused a lot of casual fliers to go carryon-only. That, in turn, causes it to take longer to board/exit planes, leading to longer turn around times.
I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees. And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons. That would decrease the number of carryons and decrease the turnaround time.
EDIT: From the article "Starting around 2008, Scheduled flight times began increasing even faster than actual ones" This has me convinced that the bag fees really torpedoed turnaround times.
[1] https://www.farecompare.com/travel-advice/airline-fees-bags-...
Recently, certain airlines have announced that small bags must go under seats so there’s room in overhead storage for roller bags. There goes my leg room and any incentive to pack smaller with just one small backpack.
Now, I’m incentivized to bring the maximum size carry on so that I get overhead space and don’t have to shove smaller bags next to my feet.
More often than not, I get to stash it in the overhead bin. There's often space for something like 3-1/2 rollers in a bin, so I can squeeze my bag in. The option of putting it under my seat is something I save for strict necessity, but it's still preferable to gate-checking.
I also don't see it as "downtime". I can check mail, message friends, call friends, read news, listen to podcasts or audio books, or music, all from my phone while I wait.
My wife is just the opposite, and always checks a giant bag. I get so irritated waiting for her bags and so stressed getting to the airport on time for them to take it -- another advantage of carryon only is that you can show up to the airport just-in-time, and you have one less unpredictable line to wait in. Carryon only + clear means I can show up to the airport 10 minutes before doors close and walk on the plane & not have to worry about lines, carry on space, waiting for luggage, etc.
Due to airline status etc. I always have a free checked bag, but I never, ever use it.
Airline lost my bad, and took 5 days for it to arrive. Had no clothes, toiletries etc. to compound things there was then a hurricane and the shops were closed.
When you need to check-in a bag, that's a whole situation. When you turn up at the airport with a backpack and a boarding pass in your Apple Wallet, now that is a nice way to start a trip.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/267204880751
Basically a non-descript nylon bag with minimal accoutrements. I curse its lack of features (extra pockets, etc) on every trip, then it goes on the shelf until the next trip. It was on sale at the local sporting goods store when I was in high school. I recently bought a cheap waterproof cover for it, because I noticed that most of the advertised "waterproof" packs come with a cover.
I have a very lightweight, tiny day pack that I either roll up and stuff in the main pack, or carry on as my "personal item." That way, I can leave the big pack in my hotel room.
All the more reason to remove disincentives from checking bags.
Honeestly the biggest reason I avoid checking bags is reliability. After you experience having a suitcase completely lost by an airline, it's hard to trust the system again.
The FAA can force airlines to dedicate about 1.5X the amount of space per person that they do today, and all of these stupid problems disappear. Airlines could even get away with the skeleton crew of airline staff that they use today with the reduced amount of people who'd be paying more per seat.
But, because we have to let far too many people fly, and because the FAA doesn't stop private companies from violating human rights with their airplane seat designs, we have to deal with this lunancy where anyone 6 feet and above has to assume a struggle position for in some cases 20+ hours (i.e. flights to Singapore) in a fully packed metal coffin.
Same with seat width. The only issues there are when a minority of passengers are so large they take up your seat, they should be removed from the flight.
I'm a frequent flyer, and the sheer carelessness of how people waste the time of everyone behind them in the boarding queue still surprises me. As if in the moment they reach their aisle they immediately forget they, too, were waiting...
I do not remember things to be so bad 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago. Some airline staff was quite active in herding the cattle back then, but also the cattle maybe was not as ignorant as today.
But maybe I am just becoming an old, grumpy man, and nothing has really changed. Who knows.
Still, as an example of the best possible case, it does make me wonder how much more efficient loading a plane could be. I can imagine some magic way to use all of the doors, even if in the short term it means walking on the tarmac to one of 4-6 stair cases.
Maybe it doesn't matter. I wonder if anyone has calculated if such a system would save (or lose) money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo
https://thepointsguy.com/news/why-the-american-airlines-shut...
https://aerosavvy.com/aviation-terminology/
They have decided to be evil.
All low costs companies in Europe have been charging for carry ons since the end of Covid. You are only allowed a backpack which has to fit under the sit in front of you for free and adding carry ons is quite expensive, can be nearly as much as the ticket.
Classic airlines have started weighting carry ons before boarding too so it’s only a matter of time before they charge.
For a normal traveler and unless you do a very short trip, prices have actually significantly increased in the past few years.
For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.
Just yesterday I took a flight where they asked everyone to try to hurry up loading so they could get the plane off the ground sooner.
I'd love to see some hard data on this (I've tried to find it in the past, but there's so much fluff about this subject)!
Passengers preferred carry-on long before fees because checked bags take longer or get lost. I’m not aware of any data showing per-passenger load / unload times have increased.
Per-plane load / unload times have definitely increased, because the average passenger count per flight has increased. Bigger planes + fewer empty seats.
https://southwest50.com/our-stories/a-turning-point-the-birt...
Still, 20 minute turns would be industry-leading.
Not sure if it would actually make an impact -you will still get blockages. Would need a queuing theorist to comment.
No thanks. I'll take a slower boarding with a traditional airline that doesn't make their passengers feel like a burden.
I know I'm not the industry's ideal customer-- taking solo tourist-class flights booked long in advance, once or twice a year, and not churning frequent flyer points, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated with contempt.
To be honest, that feels like an entire direction the travel sector needs to focus on. I'm paying hundreds of dollars to sit in your lowest-bid Metal Death Tube or stay in your Totally Not A Bedbug Sanctuary, stop treating me like a transient who walked into a Rodeo Drive boutique because I don't have Triple Ytterbium Status.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlin...
I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.
Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.
If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.
They board and deboard planes insanely quickly. Just about the only good thing about those airlines is that they are super dedicated to on-time operations and not wasting time. They can’t afford to waste any time when they’re offering $25 international flights.
Of course, not having 9 boarding groups of various status levels helps a lot too.
Yet almost 20 years later, the fees largely remain, little has improved.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a discount airline that mandates everyone travel nude without any bags at all.
Would make security and boarding a breeze… no more boarding groups! Planes would be lighter — reduced fuel cost — more environmentally friendly.
Could even charge for premium robes on arrival.
I agree, but I think another big incentive for people to bring carryons is how the airlines deal with checked baggage. All too often you have to wait forever to collect your bags, or your bag gets damaged, or your bag gets lost (usually not permanently).
With checked bag fees, the airlines took one of the worst aspects of their own service and started charging more for it. And they wonder why nobody wants to check a bag.
If airlines took checked bags seriously I'd check bags more often -- even if I had to pay to check them.
As for payments slowing down boarding: I expect that it does, but the price info I see online suggests that the carryon fees are punitive (more than checked baggage, and with a 100% surcharge for paying at the gate). In other words, the purpose of the fee is more about discouraging people from bringing a carryon in the first place than the revenue it generates.
Frontier doesn't seem to be shy about reminding customers about the gate pay surcharge, either.
> How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought?
Simple. Charge for the right to put a suitcase in the overhead bins. If it can fit under the seat in front of you, in the seat pocket, or if you can wear it, then no problem.
> Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate
The flight attendants already have the ability to say "sorry, you need to check that" if the bins are full or if an item is too big, and then get the item where it needs to go. They already have the ability to charge your card with a handheld reader if you want to order special food items. I'm failing to see the obstacle here.
getting rid of the carry-on doesn't mean no personal item, it just means you aren't allowed any space in the overhead bin.
If I chose to not bring two items (or three, or four, as many passengers do because there is no enforcement of rules), I should get to place it in the overhead bins and not have to cramp my feet.
I’d pay $60 more per flight just to not have to deal with other people screwing with giant carry on bags, and the repeated announcements that there’s no room in the overhead compartments.
As a bonus, they also set the sizes for checked luggage slightly below industry standards. Good luck finding something close to but below their linear inch limit. I figured this out because instead of checking three small bags, the family now checks one that’s right up to the weight + size limit.
They used to be the best domestic airline (due to enshittification with all the other carriers), and also one of the cheapest. They could have just raised ticket prices by $50 on average and still have been one of the cheapest.
Instead of realizing they were the premium choice, they’re racing to become one of the worst airlines. They even recently announced they’re going to charge extra for legroom early next year.
I wonder how much it will cost them to move the seats around so some of them have inadequate legroom, and how many rows that’ll add.
Anyway, yes, flights have gotten much worse in the last ten years.
It’s been awhile since I’ve boarded less than Group 4 on Delta. But I don’t remember it being that bad even with group 5 - Silver medallion, credit card holders and economy travel.
If the whole price had to be flat and bundled into the ticket the experience would be better.
It's also an industry that competes on price, and that tends toward a spiral to the bottom in quality. They aren't allowed to skimp too much on safety stuff, and if they did it'd cost more in the long run, but they are incentivized to make seats tiny and uncomfortable and nickel and dime.
This is really a safety issue. And tbf, you don't need more. I've traveled internationally with just a laptop bag.
My personal experience is I've had my luggage lost twice in the last 10 years at an average of 6 flights per year, so my personal incidence rate seems to be 2%
I can't even put my toothbrush in a checked bag anymore.
Cavity Filling: $300
Still having teeth in my 70s: Priceless
And no, it's not just a laptop bag. The list of things with batteries in our daily life is huge, and telling people to skip it just so that you can get on a plane a bit faster isn't reasonable.
Maybe in aggregate flights have fewer delays but every single flight I’ve taken this year has been delayed (on top of the padded flight times the article mentions). I’ve flown about half a dozen trips.
I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem. Airlines have exclusivity on airport gates. Any frequent flier on the SFO -> EWR route knows that if you want to save money you can book an Alaska flight instead of United but Alaska has significantly fewer gates and usually gets delayed when arriving waiting for one. Flights aren’t exactly equal commodities and even if the airlines were well-run, contracts for these gates are locked in.
Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
Live in DFW, which is an American hub and my largest option for direct flights and flight availability in general which is why I mention them
Is it? I thought that trend reversed in 2020.
Business class tickets are bought by companies not people. You pay for that "subsidy" through more expensive products to pay for that exec's stupid flight to a symposium where they all talk about how great they are and how important their ideas are.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
Otoh, I have minor elite status and have gotten upgraded to cattle plus the last couple flights which might be nice enough.
We aren’t budget travelers and we have been on a plane for leisure 12+ times a year since 2021. We are both Platinum Medallion on Delta and get automatic C+ upgrades at time of booking and enjoy our lounge access (via credit cards).
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
This includes for people making 500K+ a year. Still forced to sit in coach unless they pay out of pocket.
Normies ruined business class. Can't get business class tickets on international flights for anything less than 10X and often more like 20X the price of economy. It should be no more than 4X.
Sure, but business class is still 100% full (and frequent fliers complain that they aren't getting upgrades, so it seems to be mostly paid).
This is like when companies complain that they can't find any good devs, but don't want to pay market rate.
It's odd that in his rush to point the finger at the government monopoly, he seems to have missed that a free market where customers select flights mostly on price naturally tends towards airlines operating lower cruise speeds for better operating economy, and not allowing loads of wiggle room in their schedules to make up for delays.
The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
Well... I mean, objectively, there are not enough ATCs. Staff are being scheduled 6 days a week. Towers at small airports are operating on reduced hours because there aren't enough people, and towers are some airports are being operated with less than full staff (so each person is working multiple tasks).
Whether or not the very real staff shortage is what is causing the delays is not 100% clear. My intuition is that it is, but I don't have any actual data to support that.
Ground delays due to ATC staffing shortages are real. It’s not a secret, statistics about it are kept.
Off the top of my head, it is has affected Austin, Newark and most major destinations in Canada this year. That is not an exhaustive list by any means.
We've got percentages for delays attributed to the National Aviation System (including those for reasons other than ATC understaffing, like congestion management) here[1], it's less than half of those attributed to the carrier, with a slight trend fall. That doesn't mean ATC understaffing isn't a problem (patching gaps in shift patterns is bad for a whole bunch of safety related reasons, for a start), it means that the author is dead wrong that airlines won't do anything to jeopardise on time performance and government must be the only bottleneck. [1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/inf...
Also I think in general increasing utilization of aeroplanes increases revenues and thus makes things more profitable as money is not made while not flying. Easiest way to achieve this is to remove slack like shortening turnover times. Which then results in cascading delays as planes simply are not available at times.
What happens is typically that they hold you on the ground or at the gate until they can appropriately release your flight plan.
My experience of past 2-3 years, even if it's only 30 minutes or so and prior to boarding, there's always a delay now
Because business class is a luxury?
1. What about the annual peaks roughly 5 minutes. Seem to occur in winter? I would have thought summer delays are more, on the average?
2. Mentioning DEI at FAA without any substantial data tarnishes an otherwise interesting study.
1. the airfare inflation chart is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI which is calculated differently from the other metrics in the article; it does take into account routes popularity.
2. today’s average Economy ticket is different from the 1990s ticket: meals, seat pitch, seat selection, baggage. service changed to the point that 1990 Standard Economy is more similar to 2025 Premium Economy.
My poor travel experiences are due to airlines lying about delays and having inadequate resources to deal with the problems that led to those delays.
The trade-off isn't that there are men in cargo shorts on my flight because it's cheap, it's at the airline will strand you in some hell hole and won't pick up the phone for hours.
Airlines cut their costs hard during covid, but never undid most of those changes after covid was over. So now you have non-low-cost airlines that charge extra for luggage, for example. Or not provide a meal during a 5-hour flight. Or flight schedules so bad that booking sites insist that the best option to get form one European capital to another, with only constraint that you need to get there in the evening of a particular day, is 3 separate flights taking 2/3 of that day.
I think it's reasonable. Even if you depart the gate on time, there could be things out of the airliners' control that cause delays, such as a long queue to take off.
I stopped flying twenty five years ago. I think it's one of the better decisions I've made.
Oops, that's gonna cost you extra.
That's not to say that the average airline worker is like that; it just seemed like the bottom fell out, so that the floor on what my worst experience could be while flying became substantially worse compared to times before.
I was so mad.
I flew probably 30 times during covid restrictions, and as you say, it was absolute bliss. That return flight reminded me why flying was miserable before COVID restrictions and is miserable now.
There is just a widespread kindness gap in our society.
I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
The employer/employee relationship is basically by definition transactional.
SOME employers do reward hard work and going above-and-beyond, but it's becoming more and more rare.
The simple fact is, giving raises and promoting top performers is not good for shareholder value.
> benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty
The company I work at just laid off ~100 people. One was from my team and was a great worker that took on additional responsibilities and worked extra hours to get things done. Still got let go. How's that for rewarding loyalty?
This hasn't been my experience at all. And to be quite frank, whenever I see someone claim this, my cynical misanthropic brain assumes that's what's ACTUALLY happening is that customers are asking for exceptions beyond policy that customer service personnel can't give them and then claim they're getting poor service or that the customer service rep was rude for telling them "no" on something.
I worked retail and fast food for over 10 years. People suck. And while I got out of that industry 13 years ago, I know that people have only gotten worse. People demand the world and then complain about poor service when they don't get it.
It doesn't help that it's a weighted average. The people who don't suck tend to require fairly little time. (In fact, many of them may well suck, too, but you don't have time to notice.) The people who suck a lot always require a lot of your time.
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
The airlines -- like all other MBA-run businesses now -- are titrating their services: They cut staff and pay and quality until customers start to loudly complain or leave and then they restore just enough staff or quality until the shouting stops.
They do this repeatedly in a closed feedback loop. Any CEO that doesn't work this way in the modern era gets fired.
This was suggested to me six months ago by someone who was extreme right wing, (going as far as to say that the FAA only hired non-white employees) and I found the claims bizarre enough to research on my own. They claimed that this was a known fact, whether you read left or right news sources, but when I did my research (not on bias, but on actual hiring results), it said that historically, the FAA has been about 90% white, and currently is about 70% white (IIRC), which is a far cry from suggesting that the FAA has race and gender quotas.
Again, here, the article makes the same claim, but this time with a citation (!), so I wondered if there was some truth to it, that I missed, earlier, but again, the truth does not pan out. It seems that a few members of the NBCFAE (National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) stepped over the line in their attempts to to change hiring practices that were preventing black candidates from being considered (going from increasing the diversity of the candidate pool, which is laudable, to discriminating in order to change up the racial mix, which is illegal).
However, in all of this, it's not the FAA acting, just a few powerful individuals from the NBCFAE. That doesn't change the fact that something bad happened, just the characterization of it ends up being completely misleading.
Is it summer travel then holiday travel then a winter spring slump? That would support the author's hypothesis that congestion is to blame.
But then again, these short flights are often CHEAP. Even in “first”, where the perk is…a wider chair, sitting near the front and better snacks i suppose.
Example: I can fly from NYC to Chicago for $80 in economy. In first it’s about $200 on delta. I certainly wouldn’t expect free access to a good lounge with decent food for free at that price. It would be hard for me to be disappointed as a flyer at those prices.
It's $300 but the Peak Design backpack is amazing. It has one massive compartment which makes it easy to efficiently cram stuff in there. https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
Most backpacks seem to compete on maximizing pocket count which isn't good for tetris packing.
Although, this seems to apply only to hardshell wheeled cases - I walked aboard with my backpack & shoulder bag without any issues, and fit my backpack into an overhead compartment and shoulder bag under my seat with no problems.
But next time, I may try to pack everything into a single backpack, and re-configure things once I'm in my seat so I have easy access to a smaller subset of stuff in my shoulderbag instead.
I don't think this is that unreasonable. Gate staff can look around and count how many bags people have, and they know how much space is in the overhead bins. Not to mention that nearly every flight will run out of overhead space, so they might as well start demanding people check bags sooner rather than later.
Though the overhead bin space probably wouldn't be as bad if airlines were better about enforcing size limits. So often, a roller bag is just an inch or two too tall, so has to be placed lengthwise in the overhead bin, making it take up space that could have fit 2-3 bags.
If I see that happening and I'm traveling light enough, I've merged my backpack into my duffle bag so that I have one single "personal item" for under the seat in front of me. Nobody ever seems to care that it doesn't cleanly fit.
But jeez, forcing check-ins during Group 1 is worse than I've ever seen it. I guess it's more and more popular to use two hard-shell carry-ons and put them into the overhead compartment. And I guess the airline just sees it as an incentive for you to buy a more expensive seat.
e.g. If you max out the allowed dimensions with United you get a 45.08L carry on and a 23.65L personal item.
And most "cheapest tickets" now no longer include a carry on bag, only a personal item.
I've mine daily for 5-10 years, they're great.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
And at the end of the day, operates at a pre-tax[1] profit margin of 5% (in a good year), or 0% in a bad one.
If all airlines became altruistic non-profit entities tomorrow that only exist to serve their customers and nobody else, your ticket prices wouldn't drop more than ~$10-20.
[1] Post-tax, it's at 2.5%, but I'm not qualified to get into whether or not there's Hollywood accounting going on.
it's like picking the cheapest restaurant every time and complaining you get crap food
you have to research which restaurant to go to
But short haul, it's like having a choice between McDonalds or Burger King. 28" vs 29" pitch. £40 vs £50 for a checked bag etc.
Lower prices ? Where ? In EU surely not.
Do you think there is no man-made climate change?
We could have much lower prices and operating under the same federal safety guidelines, but rich ass pilots are exploiting collective bargaining to keep their salaries unbelievably high when they don't need to be.
That's not... rich, not in 2025. That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich. And then you have to take into account the fact that these pilots are away from home quite often, and have dozens, if not hundreds, of lives in their hands when they do their jobs, and that makes me think they're fairly compensated for doing the actual labor that the company needs to operate. Meanwhile, the CEOs make more in a year than most Americans will make in an entire lifetime [1]. And that's not even getting into some of the dividends that airlines pay people who just happen to possess a piece of paper.
[0]https://simpleflying.com/salary-us-pilot-2025/ [1]https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo...
I agree that's not exactly rich, but that's a damn sight more than "comfortable". That's really good money. I'm not even saying that's the problem with air travel like GP claimed, but let's not pretend that $160k isn't a great salary. That's more than I make as a principal systems engineer in the tech industry!
No offense to you or any other engineers, but I actually think the pilot who is responsible for hundreds of lives per flight should make more than us software folks.
I work in tech but it seems like to be a high earning pilot you just need to:
- practice flying for 1,500+ hours. That can take years unless doing it full time.
- pay 50k+ for pilot training.
- fly undesirable routes at weird times and to weird locations for 10+ years, until you “make the big bucks”.
- be away from home for approximately half the year.
- be on your “A game” daily otherwise you risk killing yourself and hundreds of passengers on your plane.
and more.
Wishing you luck on your journey, god speed complainer!
/s :)
In all seriousness I can personally think of much easier ways to earn $200k+. I don’t think pilots are overpaid.