Blame the airlines and their enablers
Andrew Compart, Travel Weekly, 8/13/2007 (excerpted)
This is not quite a Pogo moment -- "We have met the enemy and he is us" -- but the words of the famous comic strip character somewhat ring true when it comes to the delays and cancellations that are plaguing the U.S. airline industry this summer.
It's easy, of course, to write stories with yet more data showing just how bad it has become, and to blame Mother Nature, airlines and the government. There is plenty of truth to that argument, and I've written many of those stories myself.
FlightStats has helped document the misery with timely and comprehensive data. But company spokeswoman Meara McLaughlin said consumers were partly to blame for this mess, and she had a point.
As McLaughlin sees it, consumers -- she includes agents, travel managers and corporate travel departments in this category -- must share in the blame because too many of them demand that airlines provide the cheapest fares and the most flight options on a route.
Those demands have consequences.
For example, the major U.S. airlines have flooded the skies with flights operated by regional carriers flying regional jets in place of larger aircraft, so they can fly with fewer empty seats and offer more flights on a route. Business travelers like and demand more flights to give them more flexibility.
Unfortunately, that has put more aircraft in the skies and contributed to the congestion and delays.
Demand for ever-cheaper fares have contributed, too, because carriers have cut costs, sometimes in unwise ways, to make routes profitable. That has left some airlines with operations that have little margin for error or ways to compensate when the weather is a disruptive force.
The problem is that from the airlines' point of view, these strategies have worked and improved their bottom lines, with little penalty for the poor performance or service problems they create. That will continue to be the case unless customers become willing to pay more for better performance and avoid carriers and flights with a record of poor performance.
Checking airline and individual flight performance is not difficult to do. One source is the airlines themselves. Since 1987, federal rules have required airlines to tell consumers the on-time performance of a particular flight, but only if they are asked.
Another is the U.S. Department of Transportation, which has been publishing its monthly Air Travel Consumer Report for two decades. The report lists on-time performance, mishandled baggage rates and bumping rates by airline as well as flights that are late 80% of the time or more.
The latest report, released in early August with performance statistics for June, listed more than 400 flights that fell into that category, including a handful that were never on time. Not once. The DOT currently is investigating whether airlines are guilty of deceptive scheduling by continuing to offer such flights.
But with the exception of cases where a single flight is the only one offered on a route, there's no reason any customer, agent or travel manager should be booking any flight that appears on that list.
This year, consumers got an even more timely tool for monitoring carrier performance: FlightStats. Travelers or travel buyers can use the Web site's flight-rating tool to get a list that compares and ranks the on-time and cancellation performances of all flights on a specific route. It also can be used to check the past performance of any particular flight number and to get more recent data than that offered by the DOT, which lags a month behind.
As McLaughlin sees it, travel managers, corporate travel departments and agents could play a constructive and influential role in urging airlines to change their ways. She'd like to see more of them set operational standards in negotiating contracts with carriers and reward them for it with a willingness to pay somewhat higher fares.
Along those lines, FlightStats also is trying to persuade booking engines, including GDSs, to incorporate the data into its regularly updated database so that it is readily available during the booking process.
This is good in theory, but will it work?
Customers do not always have a choice of flights in a market. There's still plenty of blame to lay on the federal government for failing to provide an air traffic control system that keeps up with demand, and on airlines for failing to acknowledge their responsibility to avoid loading the system with more flights than it can handle.
Besides, if consumers did more to reward better performance, would airlines really respond? That's not a given. Enough customers have to make that choice to have an impact, and there's a cynical view that most airlines just don't care about customers. But carriers do respond to marketplace pressures. Consider Northwest, which has seen its cancellations spike at both the end of June and July.
The problems angered passengers, created a lot of bad publicity and put fear into executives that travelers would avoid flying Northwest -- if that hasn't started already.
As part of its response, Northwest is hiring more pilots and has agreed to reinstate bonuses for pilots working longer hours, both of which are costing the airline money. It also cut back on its August schedule.
As another saying puts it, "Money talks when money walks." Or, in this case, when it takes a flight on a competitor.