I'm always amused at all the carping about airline travel. Fares today are lower (including inflation) than back in the days of regulation.
If you get crappy services and high fees on the low budget airlines, people still fill the planes. Even the majors run almost entirely full. They are making money for the first time in years. If the planes weren't full, things would change but that's not going to happen.
It's a free market. If you don't like the service, don't use it or pay for first/business class fares for better service. You get what you pay for. I used to fly about 50k miles a year and survived. Now I fly much less often and it not much different than when I was a road warrior.
OTOH, it's a free country so complaining is a right that is frequently used.
The Salon article sounds to me like the airlines should go broke so passengers feel better.
Cheers
Correct.
My favorite anecdote on the difference under deregulation. I was a college student in St. Louis ~1970, with family in Minnesota. Those were the days of regulated fares and routes. As a student I could fly on Braniff for 2/3 fare, reserved seat. (With most airlines student fares were half price, standby.) I paid about $90 to $100 for each leg of the flight.
To put that in perspective - I was studying engineering, and a typical salary for an engineer with bachelors degree at the time was about $14,000/yr - roughly $7/hr.
So the cost of that airline ticket was about three days of wages - for an entry level college graduate to fly from St. Louis to Minneapolis, round trip.
Needless to say, I didn't make the flight very often. Flying was so expensive it was nothing but a luxury. The Craigs List of our day was the campus kiosks, and they were filled with notices of drivers looking for riders and riders looking for drivers. I also did some traveling by Greyhound.
Yes the service on the airline was very nice. But it was unaffordable.
In September of 1973 I came to the San Francisco area for grad school. In California there was this airline called Pacific Southwest Airlines, that operated solely within California and hence was not regulated by the FAA. And they flew Boeing 707s from SFO to LAX for $19 each way. SFO to LAX is about the same distance as St. Louis to Minneapolis.
That gives you some measure of how inflated air fares were when the industry was regulated. Deregulation changed air travel from a luxury item to a realistic alternative to automobile for the average American family.
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Airline service is what it is because it is what people are willing to pay. Every major carrier that has tried to maintain some remnant of the old service standards - and try to charge a bit more to cover the added cost - has been creamed in the marketplace.
Airlines are continuing to find ways to squeeze money out of operations because the free market has brutally informed them that, no matter what people say with their voices, when they speak with their pocketbooks they want the lowest possible fares and are unwilling to pay any realistic premium for improved service.
