You hit the nail on the head. I watched a local airline that provided quality seating (both breath and depth) for a small premium go down the drain. As soon as a low cost airline entered the market (poor seating) it was good bye to quality.
Precisely. If airlines could fill seats that provide extra room at an added price, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Do folks really think that airlines haven't thought about creating roomier seats and charging a premium?????? With all of the scrounging that airlines are doing to generate added fees, there is no doubt that they have considered this.
But over the last 30 years the traveling public has voted loudly and clearly with their pocketbooks - gives us cheap fares and service be damned.
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I'm old enough to remember a time when airlines did compete on service. That was in the days when the Federal government set minimum air fares on each route, and the fares were set at a level where even the most inefficient carriers could turn a profit. Since an airline couldn't undercut the fare of a competitor, the only way to generate more profit was to attract more travelers. Which they did by provided better service. Those are the good old days of flying that people talk about.
Those were also the expensive days of flying. How expensive was it?????
Let me illustrate. In the early 1970's I was going to school in St. Louis and my family lived in Minneapolis. Braniff and Ozark were the two airlines that had the franchise to fly between St. Louis and Minneapolis, and only Braniff was non-stop. As a student I could fly on Braniff for two-thirds fare, confirmed seat. (With most airlines student fare was half-off, standby only). I paid about $80 each way. Sounds cheap in todays dollars, but at the time that was still pretty expensive. My dad made $4/hour, so a round trip ticket was the same as one week of pay for him, pre-tax. Needless to say, I didn't fly home from school very often. In the four years I was in St. Louis I flew home three times, and two of those I paid for myself. (I was lucky enough to have a decent job and lived with a vegetarian roommate and we got by on $5/week for food, so I could scrounge the money for a couple of tickets.) More often I caught a ride with someone and shared gas - then I could get home for about $10. That's why the kiosks at colleges in those days were filled with ads for people looking for rides and riders to various locales.
In 1974 I moved to San Francisco, where there was this airline called PSA that flew only within California. By staying within California it was not subject to fare regulation by the Federal government; it's fares were regulated by the California PUC and the PUC let PSA (and AirCal, another local carrier) set fares wherever they wanted. I was stunned to learn that PSA was flying SFO to LAX for $19 each way.
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So yeah, you want to go back to the good old days when airlines competed on service??? Would you feel that way if that meant that airfares doubled or tripled over where they are now???
The result of airlines competing on price is that flying has become a direct competitor with the automobile for longer trips.
Here at TUG there are so many of us who go to Mexico every year. Or Hawaii. Or the Caribbean. Or .... wherever. We've gotten to a point where we think that making all of these trips is almost as natural as breathing.
But when people pine for the good old days, they don't realize that in those days they couldn't travel like they do now. At that time flying was only done by the wealthy and the elite, not the plebes.
