The airlines are awfully upset with the US law that forces them to show the full cost of the flight. They really want to show that they're the cheapest airline without being the cheapest.
A few things they've done:
1. They've created baggage fees for checking bags: That accounts for +$50
2. The YQ/Fuel charge: You're subject on their pricing of fuel
3. Seat Charges: If you want to reserve a seat before checking, some airlines charge for this (Namely AA)
4. Fees for printing a BP (Ryan Air), checking in at the airport (Ryan Air again), Carry on luggage (Spirit), etc
5. Charging for alcohol on long haul flights (I'm rather fine with it.. but it used to be customary)
6. Charging for food on long haul flights. (I'm looking at you US Airways CLT-AUR)
But many, if not most, of those things are things I would prefer to not pay for, and I would prefer that my seat on a given flight not subsidize the overpacking drunken Luddite who hits all those items in one swoop. The cost for an airline to serve me vs serving that high needs customer is very different, why should I pay for the extra service without seeing the benefit?
Sure, but they were giving those to you for free and now they'll be taking them away without decreasing the price. So you're still paying the same for the base fare, it's just nobody gets the "luxuries" anymore.
It's also funny how some of those "luxuries" were originally part of the base service to make everyone's experience better and by removing them, now everyone's experience is worse and costs more. Primarily: checked baggage exists as a system to get baggage out of the cramped main cabin and into simpler, dedicated storage with marginal and reasonably efficient load/unload times. By charging fees for any checked baggage (as opposed to excessive checked baggage as used to be the regime), the airlines incentivize a lot more people to try to cram every thing they can carry on into the main cabin. This results in slower loading/unloading times of people because all the carry ons fill the bins quite inefficiently; many peoples bags wind up in bins that aren't easy for them to access for them to unload; some peoples bags won't fit at all because there has never been enough room in the main cabin. The airlines now have to compensate for this by asking for volunteers to gate check bags for every flight, which is a waste of everyone's time involved, and still not as efficient for anyone involved as simply checking bags up front like airlines originally were planned to do and airports were planned to handle.
"Primarily: checked baggage exists as a system to get baggage out of the cramped main cabin and into simpler, dedicated storage with marginal and reasonably efficient load/unload times. By charging fees for any checked baggage (as opposed to excessive checked baggage as used to be the regime), the airlines incentivize a lot more people to try to cram every thing they can carry on into the main cabin."
So Frontier, Spirit, and now the "Basic Economy" fares charge even more for cabin bags than for checked bags. Problem solved.
One theory I heard about the checked bag fees (back when carry-on bags were no extra charge) was that the fee freed up cargo space so the airline could carry more paid air cargo, purposefully pushing baggage into the main cabin.
«So Frontier, Spirit, and now the "Basic Economy" fares charge even more for cabin bags than for checked bags. Problem solved.»
Because no one ever travels with baggage? You can argue its "price transparency", but forcing something everyone needs to be an "add-on" is awfully shady.
«One theory I heard about the checked bag fees (back when carry-on bags were no extra charge) was that the fee freed up cargo space so the airline could carry more paid air cargo, purposefully pushing baggage into the main cabin.»
The other theory I've heard is that "unbundling" a lot of these fees and moving them to being charged at checkin and/or the gate has meant that traditional travel agents and corporate booking can't touch or negotiate them (because they aren't direct flight costs anymore). Given most corporate expense systems don't allow for reporting "add-on fees" at an airport (and it took a while for any corporate execs to catch up to a possible need to add baggage fees as an expense that could/should be reported; many companies still seem to have yet to notice), this was a good way for the airlines to increase flight costs across the board without immediately upsetting fat cat corporate clients and choice travel agents by sneakily passing the cost difference directly to employees/flyers who at that point were a "captive audience" to the new fees.
Right, I've always thought it made more sense to charge for carry-ons than for (some moderate allowance of) checked bags, since checked bags are easier on the airline:
- less of the scarce cabin space used
- less time/complication loading the plane
- less labor to inspect (you have to apply more scrutiny to stuff a passenger can use in flight), although airless don't directly pay for that.
... but less desirable for passengers (other than not having to carry):
- have to wait for it at baggage claim
- can't access it during the flight
- have to risk the stuff being stolen or lost
Not surprisingly, every flight has the overhead bins over capacity, even though this shouldn't be possible! (I think it's because someone will have a regulation size carry-on and then add a second carry-on that takes too much space, and airline employees aren't paid enough to start confrontations by correcting passengers.)
The difficulty with that has mostly been logistics. It's hard to confirm what people are bringing on as a carry-on until you're literally boarding the plane.
Try getting $50 out of someone as they're boarding a plane.
A major part of these choices involve whether they're feasible in situations with time pressure and frustrated passengers. Luckily airline staff have huge latitude to help defuse situations with angry customers.
Part of me agrees. And I also think flying is really cheap, not expensive like people are saying here.
On the other hand, I do want to point out a couple of things. It's crazy to charge for printing a boarding pass. That does not cost money (to a first approximation). Also, substantially all the airlines that charge to check bags will gate check for free. It's just more hassle. So what's really happening is that your seat IS being subsidized -- by the people who check bags at at checkin rather than at the gate.
Yes, but hardly anybody understands price discrimination. Generally, people think that by requiring services and their prices to be bundled, their overall price will be lower. Which is not true of course.
I think mostly people are offended by the waste of having a very complex sales contract - understanding and negotiating terms is a lot of effort for all parties, and may well add up to a higher cost than what's saved through pricing efficiency.
Yes, it might do so. Depends on how expensive the services are and how easy the process is. But what annoys me is the attitude of "I prefer that Service X and Service Y be bundled together, therefore it should be mandatory that they are." Sure, there are arguments for bundling, and for unbundling. I don't see that just because some people prefer one or the other that it should be required.
Well, if we are to be able to sensibly compare prices between airlines without spending our whole lives reading fine print then we really need a "standard bundle" and a law that the advertised price be the price of the standard bundle. And at that point it's natural for people to want the standard bundle to match their own preferred bundle, because that will be the bundle whose price is most tightly optimized.
In the economists' world it shouldn't make any difference - a ticket for $200 plus a $20 option for a checked bag is economically equivalent to a ticket for $220 and a $20 rebate for flying without a bag, and if unbundling is really done for the passengers' sake then it will be equally worthwhile under the latter conditions. But I have a sneaking suspicion that if they had to still advertise the price as $220 then the airlines would suddenly decide it wasn't worth unbundling the checked bag after all.
I just don't think that "seeing what is included in a airline ticket" is all that complicated, or that it is simpler somehow than deciding on, administrating, and enforcing a "standard bundle" on all these different airlines. And there's nothing to say that the standard bundle will necessarily meet that many people's preferences. I mean, people distinguish between different services and goods all the time depending on how much they value them - I don't think they suddenly lose this ability when comparing flights.
> I just don't think that "seeing what is included in a airline ticket" is all that complicated
The airlines are incentivised to make it complicated, and just dealing with n different website layouts is challenging enough. Compare to e.g. food labelling, where we require mass in specific units and nutritional information in a specific format, or cars, which are obliged to include mpg and safety information from particular standardised tests in their advertising.
> And there's nothing to say that the standard bundle will necessarily meet that many people's preferences.
It doesn't have to - the point is just to have a point of comparison to be able to compare equivalent offerings from Airline A and Airline B, even if you end up getting a very different bundle from the standard one.
Well, maybe you could have a price-compare thing, and that seems vaguely reasonable, but what everybody seems to be talking about and demanding is that there be a required bundling of certain services. A mere labelling is quite different.
Sure, but they'll only put it in the hold for free if it's a single bag small enough for them to class it as "hand luggage", and it's to improve their boardig efficiency, not to do you a favour.
I do not understand this. Do other means of transport provide free food? I have traveled cross-country in Greyhound. Never got free food. What is that about airline travel that people want cheap, and still want luxury?
Weirdly, the low-cost long-distance bus service in the UK has an option for food, drink, more reliably available wifi and better seating at not much more in cost if you're clever about it, in the form of Megabus/Citylink Gold. Its higher-cost competitor, National Express, stops at service stations on certain routes and provides vouchers for the cafes/restaurants there. (They also often make stops at large bus stations for upwards of quarter of an hour, allowing people to get food from surrounding shops.) And at times, you can get first class on the trains at less additional cost than the wifi would cost - with comfier seating, free wifi, multiple meals, and free alcohol.
I have a suspicion the issue isn't really the lack of service, it's that either you get nickle and dimed or the next step up is an order of magnitude higher in price.
So instead of bundling into your ticket price the cost of food you may not want or like, they allow people who bring their own to save money, and only charge those who consume that particular good. Apparently this is "extortion", somehow? Nonsense.
liquids are, since you cannot bring anything through security checkin. and if you don't drink a single drop on that 14h flight, well you are an exception
if you mean in toilet then do it say in delhi and good luck on your flight, hope you have seat next to toilets and no empty plane.
if you mean buy overpriced bottled water then yes, that's an option. but imagine some people want hot herbal tea on that flight, say 1-1.5 litre (ie they are sick). good luck negotiating with some airport 'restaurant' having say 8 tea servings for you (easily costing 20-30 usd/eur together)
Then buy a drink and pack your own food. In any case, it's hardly the airlines' fault that liquids can't come through security. I just do not see what is so bad about unbundling food from ticket price.
If everyone would start bringing their own food that would lead to a huge mess of transporting, storing, unpacking, preparing and disposing of food in all sorts of random ways at various times throughout the flight by the hundreds of hungry sleep deprived passengers. Airports would be even less efficient going through security, vendors trying to sell food to go and people congregating to buy things. There's really enough general unbundling of comfort and efficiency at airports already. I would definitely pay more if even more things was standardized and included for everyone on the flight (like luggage, security, airport seating).
>"huge mess of transporting, storing, unpacking, preparing and disposing of food in all sorts of random ways at various times throughout the flight by the hundreds of hungry sleep deprived passengers."
That's generally handled by having a cart with a garbage bag attached that comes by, and having people opening their food on the small trays provided.
>"Airports would be even less efficient going through security, vendors trying to sell food to go and people congregating to buy things."
Yes. It is called a "post-security food court".
>"I would definitely pay more if even more things was standardized and included for everyone on the flight (like luggage, security, airport seating)."
That's nice for you. A lot of people don't want that, or aren't willing to pay.
> That's generally handled by having a cart with a garbage bag attached that comes by, and having people opening their food on the small trays provided.
Considerable effort has already gone into making food service efficient. One of the few reason I can imagine to unbundle food is to have fewer flight attendants. But now you're suggesting they should service the passengers in a random rather than sequential order, as not everyone would want to eat at the same time. A tray doesn't really solve the problem of the person shaking their protein drink (which hopefully stays in it's container), the person having to grab the third thing from the over head storage nor someone spilling their to go coffee over you. Food service is efficient. It comes in bulk, everyone gets served, everyone eats, everyone throws things away, done.
> Yes. It is called a "post-security food court".
"Amenities" like food courts and shops is a big reason why airports are annoying. If it wasn't for trying to get you to buy overpriced things airport entry would be as efficient as airport exit and not some IKEA style maze.
>"Food service is efficient. It comes in bulk, everyone gets served, everyone eats, everyone throws things away, done."
Great. If an airline finds that it is more efficient that they bundle food with the ticket price, then more power to them. I just don't see why it should be required that they do so.
>""Amenities" like food courts and shops is a big reason why airports are annoying."
I am sorry that you are annoyed by food courts. On the other hand, I suspect that the fact they are usually full of businesses suggests that many people patronize them and find them useful. Again, I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Prohibit airports from having food courts?
did you ever had guests in your home? did you ever have them full day inside, and didn't give them a single thing to eat the whole time? (ie those magical 14 hours). well of course no, you're not an a__hole, right?
alternative - food stalls in airports serving specific food/packaging for flights. haven't seen a single one in those 30+ airports i ever visited.
Another issue - many foods are outright smelly and many can't stand some smells (ie -> puking) - imagine 300+ people eating their own stuff inside the plane, on 14 hours flight. ever experienced a strong smell of any airline food? thank god or whoever for that.
as for food courts, they are full of 'businesses' since those have that overpriced and usually seriously crappy food paid by employer as part of trip expenses. they have their place in airports, but definitely add chaos and size - why do I need to wade through countless restaurants and boutiques just to get from checkin to gate? that's cheap. they could be in some designated accessible 'shopping area' for example.
But these would efficiency in the airports, and that's usually not the name of the game these days.
>"did you ever had guests in your home? did you ever have them full day inside, and didn't give them a single thing to eat the whole time? (ie those magical 14 hours). well of course no, you're not an a__hole, right?"
An airline is a paid service. I'm not their friend, I'm their customer.
>"alternative - food stalls in airports serving specific food/packaging for flights. haven't seen a single one in those 30+ airports i ever visited."
>"why do I need to wade through countless restaurants and boutiques just to get from checkin to gate? that's cheap. they could be in some designated accessible 'shopping area' for example."
Okay, I get it, you don't like the way airports currently are, nor all of their offerings. I still don't see why this requires that A Law Be Made governing what they are and are not allowed to offer.
I don't generally want to pay for business class, but frequent flyer programs and/or premium economy usually takes care of things like fast track, lounge access and priority boarding. But nothing of that is really special in itself.
What I want is an airline that doesn't undermine their own business by making things better for their passengers, but instead have incentive both to make things better and more efficient. If there's no upsell the airline have to make sure things are efficient and there's less reason to hold back on "goodies".
I know there have been attempts to make such airlines in the past, but maybe with the new smaller long range aircraft, that can go from smaller airports, and more competitive taxi market, for transfer, it could work.
> If everyone would start bringing their own food that would lead to a huge mess of transporting, storing, unpacking, preparing and disposing of food in all sorts of random ways at various times throughout the flight by the hundreds of hungry sleep deprived passengers. Airports would be even less efficient going through security, vendors trying to sell food to go and people congregating to buy things.
For any flight over 45 minutes I always bring my own food. It's better than anything I can get on the plane and cheaper too. There's nothing special about going through security as it's in my carry on.
Only catch is you can't bring large liquids (so no thermos full of soup). I suppose you could have a set of 3.5 oz containers you eventually merge into a bowl but that's a little too extreme even for me ...
Or, people could suck it up and not eat for an hour or two. Sure on longer flights a meal is welcome, but even missing a meal should not be a terrible burden.
No one is complaining about not getting food on a 1-2 hour flight.
Many of us routinely take plane flights that are longer than two hours. A cross country flight is 5-6 hours plus 2 hours at the airport before and often a half hour after to get checked baggage. That's an 8-hour day.
Sitting on a cramped airplane for 5-6 hours is pretty unpleasant already. Doing it hungry doesn't improve the experience.
With 5-6 hours of flight time I'm often lucky if it is only an 8-hour day. I almost never have access to a direct flight cross country, so tack on at least another hour plus taxiing, running to catch a connection, then waiting for the connection to depart. If you let airline algorithms/travel agents select cheapest available flights, the connection is quite possible entirely in the wrong direction, too, adding a bonus hour or two to flight times.
I've had companies crazy enough to ask if they could interview me on a cross-country flight day to save themselves a hotel night (after they were already planning to schedule the cheapest flights they could find), and I can only imagine those people have never traveled cross-country much.
When I fly international, it's more like 10-12 hours. Even assuming I had dinner before I boarded, sleep, and then wake up, I'm going to need some breakfast and a decent cup of coffee.
Then you have an even better incentive to fast, since it has been shown to reduce or eliminate jet lag [0].
I use this protocol on long flights and find it works well, getting me back in action within a day, even after traversing 8 time zones
It's not the airlines job to incentivize what some guy on the internet considers healthy habits. I want breakfast after sleeping through the night. Just a bit of fruit, some cottage cheese or yogurt, and some black coffee. Maybe throw out the dairy and give me an egg.
I already pay for that as part of the ticket price. I do not want them unbundled in a way that makes my very necessary breakfast more expensive.
Other people could say "Its not the airlens job to incentivize eating breakfast when so many people don't any more". I'm perfectly happy unbundling wasteful unnecessary gimmicks (from my point of view). And guess what? I win this one!
Long haul flight. Not practical to bring all meals. Buy food or starve. Principle of supply and demand. Lots of demand and one supplier. Low margins on flight and push for corporate profits so supplier needs to rake it in => Food aint gonna be cheap!
If you don't believe me buy a sandwich on a ryanair flight.
I've not seen such a long flight where meals are paid. Once you reach that timescale, food becomes non-optional. I have had 14 hour flights where the food was so bad that it wasn't even worth getting it for free, so it can still go wrong that way.
Norwegian Air does not serve free food on transcontinental flights. Fine by me, I'm comfortable surviving 12 hours without eating hot food, in fact I do it almost every day.
Melbourne to Singapore recently was 7+h with no included food, only dubious snacks Easyjet-style. And in contradiction to another comment here, the email confirming my booking explicitly stated that no outside food and drink was allowed on-board. It's anyone's guess how,well that's enforced, but on first evaluation, if that's not extortion, I don't know what is.
Seven hours with no included food would be OK in my view. I'd start to draw the line around 10 hours. Really, as long as they're up-front about it (both the fact that there's no free food, and what they sell and the prices), I'd be OK regardless.
However, banning outside food and drink is ridiculous. I'd get right on ignoring that, and if they were somehow able to enforce it, I'd stop traveling with them.
Last time I checked, AA didn't charge for getting a seat early: they just charge extra for all the seats that aren't all the way at the back.
The last time I was stuck flying with them the plane wasn't even 1/3rd full. A few people, sitting near the front, were part of their ridiculous set of reward tiers. The rest of us? Packed in the back. After the attendants closed the doors, we got the go ahead to just move to sensible seats of the exact same size and amenities, but that they'd have wanted us to pay extra for.
The airline knew the flight was empty the night before, and so did everyone that went through the check in process and sees all the empty seats they tried to upsell. Is the chance for an extra fee or two beat having the old black lady next to me look at the empty middle of the plane and ask if we were in American Airlines or in the Montgomery Plane company?
Correct, if you book a Main Cabin (coach) ticket on AA seat selection is free. The only exceptions are seats in "Main Cabin Extra" which almost always have 10%+ more legroom. These are usually the first row in coach, plus the exit rows.
That said, some MCE seats (and some MC seats) can only be selected pre-checkin by AA flyers with status. AA status holders also do not pay extra for MCE seats, whether they are status reserved or not.
There are seats that are not "Main Cabin Extra" but that AA will still charge you for, although less than they would charge you for MCE. Once the free seats are full, your options are to pay extra, or accept what is most likely going to be a middle seat separated from anyone you're traveling with.
My academic institution refuses to pay for any kind of seat upgrades, so from my perspective, the rational response is to fly on another airline. I will probably have to avoid airlines that start "offering" "Basic Economy" fares for the same reason.
Those are "preferred" seats. They're usually windows and aisles close to the front of the plane. They are released to everyone once check-in happens.
They save them pre-checkin for status holders (people who fly 25,000+ miles a year typically). As someone who flies _way_ above that number I appreciate that they do, as I am typically buying last minute tickets (less than 2 weeks out) that are much more expensive. Those seats mean that despite paying more than most people on the plane, I'm not stuck in a middle seat most of the time.
That benefits attracts people like me to try and stay loyal with an airline rather than going with the lowest bidder. I'm willing to bet that people with similar flying habits to me provide the majority of profit for an airline as well.
You may appreciate it, but I don't see a justification for why it should exist. The fact that you pay extra for last minute tickets is neither here nor there in terms of whether that should buy you the preferred seat, and the fact that you have status has nothing to do with the fact that you purchase last minute. (and, in fact, if someone else with status booked 1 month early, they'd be more likely to get that seat than you). I say this as someone who has flown on <24h notice internationally and domestically multiple times in the past year. (and of course these last minute fares can often be rock-bottom cheap, it all depends).
I understand what you're saying, but the mileage programs are not really about "loyalty"; they're about misallocating corporate dollars to more expensive seats to the benefit of the airline and the traveller/employee. I don't feel that people like you providing "the majority of revenue" to airlines should really matter either way. Dollars for seats.
I managed to just cross a mileage program threshold this year but I'll continue ranting about how terrible these programs and the flying experience in general is. Especially because having bargain-basement status on United means nothing when you're flying out of a major hub :)
> Those seats mean that despite paying more than most people on the plane, I'm not stuck in a middle seat most of the time.
The MCE seats also serve this purpose.
> I'm willing to bet that people with similar flying habits to me provide the majority of profit for an airline as well.
Well, because it encourages people like you to keep their "status," and people without "status" now have to pay extra for a regular seat, it probably benefits the airline. But it is another fare class that the airline invented to make more money, much like the basic economy fares discussed in the article.
>After the attendants closed the doors, we got the go ahead to just move to sensible seats of the exact same size and amenities, but that they'd have wanted us to pay extra for.
Well, you're lucky you were not on Air Asia. They don't allow you to move to the seats they charge for (Emergency row etc.,) even if they are all empty and the rest of the leg space challenged aircraft is extremely full.
What incentive would you have to upgrade if you knew taking a chance on them being empty might yield a free upgrade? How do they disperse the free seats if they _do_ want to give them away?
Last time I flew American, it was a bit different, because the system showed many seats as simply unavailable -- not even purchasable. I paid for seats to ensure I could sit next to my wife... And we had the whole row to ourselves. I complained very loudly to the flight attendant and ended up getting a refund email a few days later. So I guess that worked.
Seems odd also as they would normally not want all the passenger weight in the back, for center-of-gravity balance. Probably also why they encouraged people to spread out after boarding.
#2 is complete BS (fuel is an inherent part of the cost) but I have no problem with the rest. I especially don't get the outrage over baggage fees. Transporting passenger baggage costs money, both due to handling it, and due to the opportunity cost of cargo they could be carrying instead. "Free" baggage just means that light travelers subsidize people with bags. That's great if you have bags, but not great if you don't, and incentivizes inefficiency.
The flip-side is with baggage fees, passengers have incentive to sneak bulky baggage into the cabin, or carry the absolute maximum allowed amount of carry-on. This ends up forcing people to gate-check their luggage, because the cabin runs out of space. This costs time and annoyance.
I assume the airlines have done the math and the time cost is less than the increase in revenue.
All that said, I almost always fly carry-on only, for my own convenience (no waiting at baggage claim, no lost/damaged luggage, etc). I often wonder what on earth some people are taking with them on vacation - I can do a two week vacation with carry-ons (1 luggage, 1 small backpack), and that includes a bicycle kit (helmet, shorts/jersey, shoes, and pedals) on top of normal clothing.
I'm skeptical that baggage fees have a lot to do with people bringing carryons on board. Business travelers typically don't personally pay for checked luggage and many are exempted anyway because of frequent flyer programs. Yet most just take carryons for the flexibility and to save time--and because they usually know how to pack efficiently. When I walk through the departure level, most of the people I see lined up to check vast piles of suitcases look mostly like families traveling.
Anecdata, but I have gone from 100% checkin to almost 100% carryon because I'm simply not interested in paying one more fee. I'd rather have someone handle my bag for me, especially if the alternative is schlepping it through multiple connections, but the airlines have incentivized people to carryon instead. It absolutely slows down boarding and fills overheads. This is probably why Southwest still allowed 'free' bags; they turn around planes quicker than anyone else.
Then there's always the jerks who bring their entire matched luggage set as "carry on" and then bitch and moan that nobody will move their stuff in the overhead for them, and act offended when anyone heaves a sigh and rolls their eyes as they trudge up and down the aisle looking for somewhere to shove their bag that they know won't even fit anyway. "I fly all the time, I know it will fit" -_-
>The flip-side is with baggage fees, passengers have incentive to sneak bulky baggage into the cabin, or carry the absolute maximum allowed amount of carry-on. This ends up forcing people to gate-check their luggage, because the cabin runs out of space. This costs time and annoyance.
Right, but that's an artifact of only charging for one of two "cost-adders", when they're close substitutes.
It doesn't refute the general point that it makes sense in general to charge more for things that add legit costs; the problem here is that they're not being consistent about it. Per previous discussion, charging for carry-ons seems to make more sense than charging for (a moderate allowance of) checked luggage:
You're right. Charging for baggage is reasonable, but the in-cabin consequences are pretty annoying. I'm actually surprised that it's worth it, given how much extra time it must take to turn around an airplane.
The "right" answer would, of course, be to charge for carry-on luggage too. I think some airlines are starting to do this now. I bet their customers won't be happy though.
The "fuel surcharge" is usually a tax dodge. British Airways, which has the most notorious surcharge in the industry, does it because the taxes only apply to the fare itself; if they split out fuel charge separately, they only get taxed on the base fare.
Also taxes are paid when you redeem miles for an award flight. BA is happy that you have to also pay ~1/2 of the ticket price in cash besides the miles.
Interesting! I assume there's some requirement to at least vaguely reflect the actual cost of fuel, so they can't just charge $1 for the "fare" and put the rest as a tax-free "fuel surcharge"?
Not saying I agree, but I believe the general argument is that if tax was already paid/collected when the fuel was purchased, unbundling it from the fare price prevents it being taxed again.
How are fully-consumed process inputs handled in VAT? It's easy to calculate non-consumed inputs. They paid $x per kg of aluminum. Each finished product contains y kg. So the "cost basis" for each product is $x * y.
But what happens to, say, the electricity used to melt the aluminum before being poured into molds?
I think it works as follows: say you make sales for one million plus 20% VAT. You get paid 1.2mn, but 200k are for the taxman. However, you already paid VAT for your inputs, say 30k for 150k in materials and 20k for 100k in electricity. You then give to the state only 150k: the 200k you collected minus the 50k you paid (i.e 20% of the
'Value added' 1mn-150k-100k).
Ah, that makes sense. Relatively easy to calculate compared to the itemization I was thinking of -- at least, I'm assuming it can be aggregated in a way that makes the calculations easy.
VAT only taxes added value. So, if VAT applied to fuel, the airline gets a VAT rebate for everything that they buy (including fuel), and then pays VAT on their total sales. Nothing is taxed twice.
If there's some tax benefit to splitting a fuel surcharge out, obviously taxes on fuel aren't an ordinary VAT...
Fuel duty is its own thing in Britain, so at a complete guess maybe fuel duty subsumes/replaces VAT but then companies aren't able to offset it like they can with VAT?
I mostly agree with you. But I am willing to bet the the baggage fee is much more than what is costs the airline to transport the bag. Which would mean the airline is generating more profit from the bag people than the bag-less.
There's nothing wrong with that. Charging more than the underlying cost is how companies make money. The airline industry is fairly competitive, so if there's room to cut prices, it'll happen.
They used not to include it in the price and surprise you about it later. They knew that UA was being compared to DL to AA. Each of those companies had different prices that they paid for fuel. The other bit about that, when the fuel markets fall.. you rarely see the airfares fall as well. Right now it's incredibly low, but that's really rare. (Seeing 200/400$ fares of US->EUR flights)
Airlines are locked in on their fuel prices years and years in advance. Doubtless many of them are still futured into paying the jet fuel equivalent of $4/gallon for gasoline.
Apart from perhaps printing a boarding pass and (given security) food on very long flights, these all seem OK to me. Not charging for checked baggage is equivalent to taxing those who pack light and subsidizing those who pack heavy (and cost more fuel).
Charging for checked luggage means I'm going to bring as much luggage as I possibly can get away with into the main cabin, slowing boarding and unboarding, taking up overhead bin space, etc. What they SHOULD be charging for is carry-ons.
Airlines have to pay the airport ground crew to load and unload checked luggage. It doesn't cost the airlines much extra to have really slow boarding and unboarding, nor does having the cabin packet to the max with carry-ons affect them much.
It can in extreme cases, but based on totally unscientific observations, the number of flights delayed significantly because people spend too long time stowing their carry on is tiny. Even just looking a boarding related delays, I'd say people simply not showing up at the gate on time is a much bigger problem.
Even a small airplane like a 737 costs millions of dollars to purchase and (off the top of my head) another million a year to maintain. When it isn't in the air, moving people who paid for tickets it is not earning its keep.
I wish I could cash in on checked luggage for reduced fares; I never travel with more than a carry on, but have tons of free checked bagged due to status.
The overall matrix of things that apply to a flight is annoying though.
There's an Uber for Air Freight business in that somewhere. Pair people who want cheap next day delivery on a package and people who are flying but not checking any luggage.
Japan has cheap next day delivery for parcels. You can even send food such as fresh sashimi in chilled containers (and it will arrive cold and carefully handled). Of course, smaller country with a culture of good service.
You don't need to go to Japan for that. Many years ago I ordered fresh lobster from Massachusetts to Minnesota, it arrived packed on ice and still alive.
Great idea but don't NA air transport regulations require you pack your own luggage? I certainly got asked that multiple times last time I went from Europe to NA.
I wonder if that's an actual requirement, or whether answering no will just guarantee a baggage search. You could also receive the goods and then pack them yourself to avoid that.
Can't you already filter by flights that don't meet your criteria?
It would be even better if you could specify an arbitrary utility function over the flight properties (total price, bags you want to bring, seat size, departure time sensitivity, etc) and have the results ranked by that function.
It makes sense. Getting price-elastic customers to signal that they're sensitive to prices isn't going to be by offering them the same product as everyone else. They'll signal it through planning longer in advance, rearranging their personal affairs to leave at a better time, or engaging in frequent-flier programs. Price-inelastic customers have to be offered something extra at a price increase proportional to the customers you're trying to target. So you offer increasingly overpriced extras to try to get the guy who would've paid more for your product to actually pay more for your product.
I think the lesson here is that the airline industry often operates on very small margins.
Indeed, Airlines almost always struggle with profitability. A few of these airlines restructured their prices to seem more competitive because they can't really lower prices any more than they have, otherwise they would go out of business. And it's entirely possible for some customers to get lower prices now, it's just not any more cost effective overall than before for average day to day usage.
You can call them greedy or manipulative all you like for doing this but it won't change the economics. Running an airline is expensive for a multitude of reasons.
Hearing stories of Richard Branson's efforts to create a good airline with Virgin in an industry full of shitty ones, then mostly failing, made me very sympathetic to how hard the problem is in a marketplace like that . And some people think Uber and AirBnB have it hard...
Air travel has become the least dignified means of transportation. Almost everything about it is terrible. Shopping for tickets. Checking in. Security. Waiting. Boarding the plane and fighting for overhead bin space. Seat dimensions. Lavatories. Literally everything is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is that it makes long distance and overseas travel logistically possible on an acceptable timescale. Given the choice to drive for 8 hours or fly for 2 I always chose to drive. At some point I think concerns for health, safety, and the basic human dignity of having personal space have to come in to play.
The hollowing out of the middle ground seems to happen in most commoditized markets.
Take meat. Used to be you'd go to the butcher for your meat, and you'd get a reasonably good product, from a butcher who knew where the meat came from, probably even the farmer who reared the meat. That was the way almost everybody got their meat, so the fixed overheads of having a butcher shop was spread over a large customer base.
Move along a couple of decades. Supermarkets, with their more efficient logistics, eat into the meat trade. Butcher shops almost completely disappear. But supermarket meat goes through a longer supply chain with larger suppliers that have the efficiencies of scale to cope with the pricing power supermarkets have. The butcher shops that survive turn into boutiques, where their unique selling proposition is what used to be commonplace: that they know where the meat is coming from and probably know the farmer that reared it.
The market bifurcates into two basic strategies, low price and high quality (see also Porter's Cost Leadership and Differentiation).
The consumer who's willing to pay a little bit more for a little bit more quality ends up having to pay a lot more rather than a little bit more, because the pool of people who could spread the fixed costs of the higher quality is split - most go for the lowest priced product. There's a ratchet effect, where slightly higher quality products are, at the margin, increasingly expensive because there's no scale in that strategy: the more expensive they become the less uptake they get, which means they have less scale, which means they become more expensive.
In some ways it's a collective action problem: what would be a better outcome for a large group of people can't really occur because individual actions can't sustain a stable state change. In other ways - many, if not most economists believe this - it's a better outcome overall, because more people get to use the bargain basement product.
But I think people in the middle are usually worse off in commoditized markets.
That's a very interesting phenomenon with the butchers (and about 1/5th of the American retail economy in my experience), but it's not what's happening in airline services.
Airlines have jacked up the prices of comfortable berths people can sleep in on long haul journeys to almost 10x the price of shrinking torture chairs that most of us buy. For a long while business class and coach drew apart in price even as business got more luxurious with flat beds and fancy wines while coach seats in Boeing's newest, most advanced 787 jets are the narrowest trans-oceanic seats ever sold and Spirit/Frontier domestic seats don't even recline anymore.
But that difference was driven by corporate executive passengers whose employers were paying the 10x prices and getting tax breaks for doing so. Corporate sales is complicated and charging more can actually sell more units so the airlines carefully eliminated mid-priced options to force businesses to pay far more for the very profitable business class seats than their marginal cost.
And economic rationality has reasserted itself. Premium economy seating is now common on airlines outside the USA without such easily gamed large corporations to scam. The premium economy is similar in quality to old-fashioned business class seating at prices that middle class leisure travellers can afford. Mostly you can't buy it from the USA without paying a steep premium, but anyone flying to the USA from abroad has been able to for about a decade. Carriers refused to sell it at the same prices in the USA because running the game on corporate purchasing departments is so lucrative. For example, JAL and Cathay Pacific round trip fares between the Far East and USA in premium economy have been about $500-1000 more originating in the USA than in their home countries.
But Delta and American are now outfitting planes with premium economy because it's the most profitable use of space for carriers that have it and supporting the corporate business class sales inflation scam can't hold it back anymore. American is flying the new class on planes already. Even CX and JL prices are starting to rationalize.
So the key variable in airline discomfort has been American corporate purchasing culture irrationality and not the natural division of markets into tiers. Corporate purchasing irrationality and cartel pricing to exploit it are also the drivers of advance-purchase fares, last-minute price gouging, saturday night stay requirements, steep premiums for one-way fares, and lots of other paradoxical and nasty pricing strategies.
For a 6' tall person, the current seating is actually very inconvenient on 8h+ flights. No hyperbole at all!
So maybe the solution is to all genetically convert our offspring to shorter persons :)
How tall, though? I'm taller than 95% of the US population, have flown quite a bit, and have never had a problem. They can't build all the seats in the plane for people in the 98th percentile and up. (Or rather, they can build some, and call them 'first class'.)
I think it's very anti-humanistic to say that someone born tall should be required to pay for seats that are 10x the price of people that require slightly less space, or simply not travel long distances.
Perhaps it's worth comparing to people in wheelchairs. Airlines accommodate a few wheelchair-bound people on flights, but if more than that number want to fly, they need to pay extra. Shit luck for them, but the alternative would be for everyone else to subsidise wheelchair-bound people whenever they want to fly. If you consider, for the purpose of this conversation, being tall as similar to being wheelchair-bound that's the choice.
So what happens with people of below average intelligence and physical ability? They're likely to suffer from lower earnings. Should a person of average height and on minimum wage subsidise a well-paid tall person?
In an ideal world, chairs would adjust so that everyone is comfortable and still allow the same number of people on the plane at the same price. However, in the real world, we probably have to accept that allocating comfort based on ability to pay, with a bit of flexibility on both sides, is the best outcome.
I mainly meant to say that it's a ridiculous idea to suggest business/first class as a solution to basic needs given the absolutely insane pricing structure. Obviously reality makes it impossible for everyone to enjoy exactly the same advantages, regardless of their in-born traits.
So it depends how you define "basic needs". For me, this is a "nice-to-have" which might be skewed by my being average height and build. Those above average height, especially those who fly frequently, are more likely to consider it a basic need.
I think it's anti-humanistic to say that, because a small number of people are born a particular way, that others must be charged more money so that they can be accommodated by more services than they would want consume. See? It's so easy to call people anti-humanistic.
Most airlines that I've been on have started turning the exit row into a "non-first-class extra legroom" row. On a few occasions I've seen very tall people sitting there. And there's nothing wrong with building a range of legrooms into a plane. But I don't see why there should be some requirement that a costly good - legroom on a plane - be provided to more people than actually want to pay for it.
But first class largely costs more because of its larger legroom. Certainly there's no problem with having a long-legroom-but-no-frills class of seats. Indeed, unbundling services would probably facilitate this.
Have you flown international business or first class before?
It costs a much larger premium than the space differential, it largely costs more due to price discrimination, because many fliers in business aren't the ones paying for their tickets. If you're talking about real first class (which can carry up to a 30-50x price premium on the economy rate), there's also very attentive service, nice champagne, multi-course meals made by an onboard chef served on china plates with silverware, seclusion, sometimes even private rooms. I would not characterize it as "largely because of its larger legroom".
If you mean to say that many people choose business/first because of the additional space, that's more correct. But even in business, it's more about lying flat and other factors than simple legroom.
I have flown first class, not international business. Yes, there is of course a range of first class experiences. Many include expensive additional services.
But a sigificant component of the cost is simply that first class carries fewer people per linear foot than does economy.
Allowing the unbundling of services is much more likely to allow the emergence of an "extra leg room only" class, than is a situation where services must be bundled into a standard package. If the prices have to be the same regardless of seat location, and be packaged with an identical bundle of food, blankets, etc, then that's a strong disincentive to attempt to sell a separate class of legroom seats. And it's much more likely that a "standardized seat" will be too short for very tall people than it will be tall enough - and even if it were, that would mean fewer seats on the plane and thus higher prices.
I started paying business just for the legroom. It's the only reason.
And it's not always as somebody pointed out above that you may chose the door seats for the same price. I had to take a last minute trip for this summer vacation. Those places were part of some "Comfort" plan I didn't even hear of while booking. Fortunately those were the only ones free on the plane and they let me sit there for free. They were booked out for the flight back though...
It's a pain, it got worse through the decades and I fail to understand that development. Was the free market not supposed to make everything better and cheaper? ;)
I spend about 100 hours per year in the air, always in economy class, and I'm average height and build.
I'm not saying it's at all comfortable, just that it's rather hyperbolic to call it 'torture'. I have a book, an MP3 player and some headphones, and then look forward to landing. I prefer to have the money than pay for extra comfort. FWIW, I also have a pretty small car for exactly the same reason. I wouldn't call that torture, and wouldn't expect anyone to subsidise big cars just so I feel more comfortable for the same price.
I wouldn't call it torture, but I would call it "uncomfortable". I'm average build too; I don't mind the lack of legroom in economy, but when I have to spend an entire 12 hour flight managing where my elbows are (ahead of my seatmate, behind my seatmate, arms across my chest, hold the seat in front of me, etc) it's very uncomfortable. A shared 3" wide armrest is just NEVER going to work. If I could just sit in a relaxed pose I'd be thrilled.
Every time it comes up, I rant about the need for a human-sized seat that's only perhaps 50% more expensive, but it virtually doesn't exist. (Save Premium Economy on Lufthansa and Air NZ, neither of which I've ever tried due to arcane rules about what seats you're allowed to pre-buy on what codeshares.. thanks, United).
Wanting enough space for my elbows to be able to stay within the confines of my seat should not cost me 10x as much.
I fly US-South East Asia a couple times a year. Economy fares are around $1k(or $500-800 the last few months). Business class fares can be had for about $4-5k. Premium economy for around $1,500-2,000. My problem with premium economy is that for 50%-100% more than the economy fare, you're not getting much. Slightly(1-2") larger seat and pitch. Slightly better food. Earlier boarding. I wish they would have something in the $2,000-2,500 price point with those recliners that you find in domestic first class. I'd definitely pay that much for it.
I hear what you're saying, but I can't justify paying a full multiple of base fare.
Economy plus might not be the best thing in the world, but 50% more is at least within the realm of human affordability, and partial recline and my own armrest sounds downright luxurious. For 5x as much as a coach fare, the perks better be things I shouldn't discuss on a public forum.
And I don't really care about the quality of food or service, how many times they bring me a hot towel, etc. Just want a good seat.
While I agree with your points, I would also add that most of the people who are in the middle in the second, bifurcated market would likely be in the low end or outside the market entirely in the first market, e.g. they won't even be able to afford the meat. So they're not really worse off, the goalpost has moved.
I don't agree at all. Even today, meat from a good butcher is quite affordable. A much bigger part of the cost is physically visiting the butcher, since there's far fewer of them.
It does tie in with two-income families (households are more time-poor) and other changes in the economy, it's not just commoditization.
Totally agree. Some of the fares are really cheap these days. For example a return flight from Manchester to Dublin booked two weeks in advance is £20. That's a journey that can only be done by flying for one hour or driving for two followed by a three hour ferry.
Or perhaps even better, a return from Manchester to Nürnberg for ~£30 in 2 hours instead of a 14 hour drive plus ferry. The fuel for that alone (not including the ferry) would cost £170.
I just don't understand the complaints!
Booking a few months in advance I can get a return trip to the otherside of the world (Australia) for under £700 and get there in less than 24 hours. I find that incredibly cheap and would be mindblowing just 20 years ago.
It's not just about bargain basement product though. Supermarkets do offer premium products and prices more people can afford. Maybe not hand-reared meat, but better cuts of meat from e.g. Aberdeen Angus. The Bronze turkey we had for Christmas was dry hung, bought at Aldi (a German owned chain that operates here in the UK) at the price of a basic bird from a butcher.
My experience of supermarket premium products is that they are barely acceptable approximations of a quality version of the product.
Take cheese, for example - it's much easier to taste the difference with cheese. I've never had a UK supermarket Comte comparable to a Comte from a cheesemonger, no matter how premium it was advertised.
Or pastries. The only widely distributed supermarket in the UK with what I would consider edible pastries is Waitrose, and not all branches have a decent range. But bakeries in the UK have their own mass-market pathologies.
What really brought the insight home to me was my experience eating in Morocco. There, bread was baked by street vendors - it was always fresh and warm. You have to get lucky with timing to get the same experience in the UK, even if you go to bakeries. I realised we've lost certain qualities of life with our economic setup, and the more I found out about good food, the more I realised that supermarkets and commoditization had created a mechanism that forced me to work much harder to get good food.
Anyway, this isn't directly related to airline seats, but I do think the ratchet effect is real and it shows up in a lot of places.
> There, bread was baked by street vendors - it was always fresh and warm. You have to get lucky with timing to get the same experience in the UK, even if you go to bakeries.
Maybe that's just the UK? In Germany, many supermarket and discount store chains have recently been outfitting their stores with bakery stations, where you have a somewhat decent chance of actually getting warm rolls.
Also, I've had a pretty good experience with premium products in German supermarkets. I only rarely buy from a premium store (sometimes for cheese, almost never for meat), but when I do, their performance is pretty comparable to supermarket premium lines.
Yeah, that sounds like just the Anglosphere. I've been to Montreal and lived in Israel, and in both those places you darn well get fresh bread and pastries in either the supermarket or bakery shop of your choosing.
Mind, I was fortunate enough to live in the best baking city in Israel (something like 53 bakeries in a city of 300000 people, plus supermarkets and open street markets), but still.
Funny thing is this also describes the job market. Very low wages at the bottom, not even enough to sustain a living, nothing in the middle, high wages at the top. Hollowing out of the middle. All a result of supposed efficiency, but really it's just externalities pushed onto the employees. It's not as if they can afford it, they have no choice.
"nothing in the middle" is a blatant lie and hackernews discussions are much better when they are backed by facts and logical arguments rather than political clap trap.
A median says close to nothing about repartition. That's not a fact that you can use in a logical argument against your opponent's claim about repartition.
There's quite a few households and quite a lot of people between $35k and $100k. The claim that there is no middle class is blatantly, provably false. The very, very top has a lot. I don't think anybody is disputing that (I'm certainly not). But there are a lot of people who make a solid, middle class income.
The share of total national income for the middle class has been in decline for 50 years. The piece of the pie that the middle class represents is shrinking.
You're assuming the poverty line is a relevant metric. And regardless of the accuracy of that assumption, you still don't offer any information on the income spread over percentiles, nor a source for your one claim.
> In 2015, in the United States, the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was at an annual income of US$11,770; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$24,250.
I think that's the general setup you get when an economy cartelizes. The untold story of American inequality has been the reversal of decades of antitrust work by the state, resulting in the oligopolization of most major labor, consumer, and capital markets. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaug-2016/popul...
So why are you telling the story with supermarkets and meat producers framed as actors? Looks like it's the consumers who have collectively made this decision, and companies have just been following their wishes.
Yes indeed, consumers have collectively made the decision from the choices given to them by the market (you need at least two sides for most market outcomes, since transactions generally have two parties). My point is that not all consumers are necessarily better off from the collective decision.
The fact that you only see two choices at the stabilized market right now doesn't mean that these were the only two choices present when the market transformed.
It's impossible for everyone to be happy when you're making the collective decision.
It's not just price. Most consumers don't want to waste time travelling to multiple different specialty food stores. It's not worth the hassle for a marginal improvement in quality.
I don't know about 8 hours, but for a lot of semi-local business, I've started taking my car or a train (if available). Even if you have pre-check (and especially if you don't), you're looking at a ~40 minute drive, uber, or public transit ride to the airport, all with their own cost, followed by an hour or more of downtime and further indignity of being corraled and scanned, followed by 30+ minutes of waiting on the tarmac after landing. Then you get to wait to get off the plane. If you were crazy enough to check luggage, add another ~20 for that. Then you're in an airport, not exactly in the city center, without transportation. Get on a shuttle to rent a car or go wait for transit.
All told, it's easily 2+ hours on top of your flight.
On a train, I get out my laptop, do some work (the wifi is usually free; eat shit, gogoinflight), maybe nap a bit, and arrive in about the same total time. Much nicer.
I live in NYC and whenever I go to DC I always take the train. It's about the same time as flying but with less chances of delays. I flew once and was delayed for 8 hours and have taken the train ever since. I drove once but that was slightly slower than the train and not as relaxing as sitting back with a drink and a laptop.
To Boston though I usually fly. It is actually much faster if you leave at the right times to avoid traffic which you'd want to do if driving too. It's about 100% faster in my experience.
I drove to Chicago once and that was about 12 or 13 hours. I've flown a bunch of times and it takes, door to door (depending on when you leave, etc) about 4 hours total. So it's much faster.
Another thing about Amtrak is, they do not own their tracks. Instead they use tracks from other companies and have to yield priority to them. The American train system will always be much slower than necessary because of these system delays.
There is a very good youtube video on this subject.
The Northeast Corridor[1], where the DC-NYC route that was previously mentioned is part of, is owned primarily by Amtrak -- so they get priority on the rails and can run as often (and as fast) as they please. However, they share the rails with other passenger rail lines so both entities cooperate on scheduling and maintenance.
Not to mention that there are sections that are designated as high speed sections, consist of 4 tracks (1 local and 1 express track in each direction), and is electrified. Plus, there are regional transportation agencies (and Amtrak) that operate locomotives capable of 150mph+.
Yes, I know this speed pales in comparison to Europe, but as far as I'm aware, it's still faster than any other rail system in the US.
That's why when Northeast US people rave about Amtrak service (between Boston and DC), and everyone else doesn't, both sides think the other side is crazy due to a myopic view.
What suffers in the Northeast is delivery of freight, so almost all of it needs to go by truck, which contributes to traffic congestion, and drives even more people to mass transit for long distances (which makes it easier to make a convincing case for expanding passenger rail operations). Or to relocate to more densely-populated cities that have rail access.
One interesting by-product of this, is diesel engines are banned in New York City rail tunnels, so the only way to get freight from New Jersey into New York city, is via a 140-mile detour known as the the Selkirk Hurdle[2].
In other parts of the US, the rails are owned by freight companies (BNSF, CSX, etc), so their customers' cargo gets priority, and Amtrak suffers because they don't automatically win the "battle" like they do in the Northeast.
Additionally, in these areas, due to the lack of electrification, Amtrak has to rely on an aging fleet of diesel locomotives[3] that break down often, and when they do, everything gets backed up. Couple this with the fact that the only section of Amtrak's network that's profitable is the Northeast Corridor and there's less incentive to throw good money after bad, and also leads to politicians calling for the defunding or even eradication of Amtrak.
If you ever happen to be in Europe (specifically, Switzerland or France) or Asia (specifically, Japan), try their high-speed trains. Pure perfection. Even German, Italian, Spanish, etc trains are still a lot better than the US train system.
While Switzerland has a decent rail system (high frequency, somewhat dense), it doesn't have high speed trains. Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands all of at least some high speed lines.
I took a Chinese high-speed train a week ago, I concur it was very pleasant and affordable. $60 roundtrip for approx the distance between Seattle and SF, 3.5 hrs journey.
Taking trains between any of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, NYC, and Boston is not really comparable to doing so in the rest of the country, (because those are on the Acela Express line which, while not as nice as high-speed rail in Europe or Asia, is a reasonably acceptable substitute).
I live in NYC but Pittsburgh is my hometown; I have even been preferring a train to go that far these days. I was Diamond on Delta in the past, just gonna miss platinum this year because I flew off-airline enough; I fly a lot, but if a train is feasible I tend to prefer it.
NYC to Pittsburgh is actually a subpar trip in terms of Northeast train travel. It's smooth-sailing from NYC to Philly and Philly to Harrisburg, but once you get west of Harrisburg, speeds drop drastically and the resulting trip is much slower than driving. This is because the tracks are shared with other trains and run through mountainous terrain. Because the trip isn't great, it's not that heavily used and Amtrak only runs one train a day each way between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg.
It's a shame really! A high speed track between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg would really improve accessibility for the city and be well used I think. I know there's been some talk of it, but no real progress made.
Yup. A few years back some friends and I went from SF to LA for a conference. We all left home at the same time. The people who drove and the people who flew arrived at the hotel within 15 minutes of one another.
Part of the problem is non-linearity of delays. If you are delayed 45 minutes in traffic towards the airport, you may miss your flight and have to wait 6+ hours for another. With driving, if you are delayed 45 minutes, then you are just delayed 45 minutes at your final destination.
Because of this, people frequently spend a lot of non-productive time at the airport, because they are afraid of the (small) chance that they can miss their flight entirely.
When you're trying to be price sensitive for your reimbursement (say, keeping startup runway in mind), the 55.5 cents per mile reimbursement very quickly overtakes the cost of other forms of transit.
I can't imagine driving 6-7 hours vs. flying. As it is for especially tight schedules I can get up at 4:30am to catch a 6:00am flight, and be at a 9am meeting in downtown Chicago with 45 minutes to prep. That's including the 20 minute uber on the MSP side and 45 minute Blue Line ride to the loop. I can't remember the last time I spent more than 5 minutes in security on either end. Door to door is 3.5-4 hours pretty reliably.
I have colleagues that prefer to drive that, and I only do it if it's the last option available. For me, the driving is my full day and them I'm exhausted while taking a flight I can nap or do work - much less unproductive time.
I think a 4-5 hour one-day drive is about my limit before I'll look hard at flight options. I also don't mind taking a flight for work on my "own time" since I find the whole process rather peaceful and can just zone out reading/catching up on news. Driving you'll have to pay me :)
To each their own though - I know without precheck and being able to jump the standby list flying would be much more miserable. It's certainly a race to the bottom that's sad to watch.
IIRC the USA doesn't really do trains. Also, trains have public seating, which means they Can't Have Nice Things thanks to various anonymous assholes - in comparison, most people don't wreck their own car.
How much of that is the perception of anonymous assholes vs the real thing? American passenger trains used to have open sleeper cars, but not anymore, which is kinda sad because I don't want to have to choose between coach (uncomfortable) and roomette (expensive) on the LA/Chicago route.
the US does a lot of trains, but generally for short distances on commuter corridors, and municipal light rail. we don't do high speed passenger rail, which is probably what you're thinking of.
If a car could drive itself then you wouldn't need the rather-awkward driver's seat (plus the required visibility for driving), and you might be able to squeeze in an actual bed or couch-like thing.
What the sibling said about noise and vibration, plus the fact that you are in the seat for less time (the rest of the time spent in airports, walking from point to point, standing in line, etc.), plus the fact that you can get up and walk around at any time (I always get aisle seats).
Yes, at least for me, it's not just the size, it's also the vibration. And while the noise is usually louder in the plane, its nature is somehow worse in the car.
Probably because jet engines operate smoothly at constant RPM so the sound is monotonous and gets tuned out quickly, whereas car engines operate roughly at low and wildly varying RPMs. It also depends on the car--a Toyota Yaris with a 4 speed auto (lol in 2016) would pretty awful, where as a Lexus LS600h with V8 and CVT would be very pleasant.
You can choose from literally hundreds of car seats when purchasing a vehicle, and I have never, ONCE been in a car seat less comfortable than the standard airline economy seats which, despite coming from different manufacturers across different airlines, are universally terrible. Flat as a board so you put pressure on your tailbone, no support anywhere, just terrible. I'd rather sit on a park bench.
Give me the option of paying $200 per ticket to sit in my car's seats on an airplane, I'd do it every time.
When comparing an 8-hour drive to an 8-hour door-2-door plane trip, only about 3-4hrs is actually spent in that economy class seat. And for all the discomfort of the seat, you can get up and stretch and walk around without crashing the vehicle.
It goes both ways. I used to live in Denver, and it was faster for me to ski in Alta (after flying to SLC) than it was for me to drive to I-70 ski resorts on a weekend.
How quick is the flight and ski in Alta? I don't remember that being the case at all when I lived in Denver especially if you went to a place like Loveland, A-Basin, Breckenridge or Copper. Vail was a bit farther and more possibilities for road issues though.
This seems like a distinctly American problem - admittedly, it's been a very long time since I've been in the US to see it for myself.
Here in Australia, I check in on the mobile app, arrive at the airport around 40 minutes before my domestic flight, take 1 minute to walk straight to the automated Qantas Bag Drop point (and there's almost never a queue of more than 1 or 2 other travellers), take around 30 seconds to scan my boarding pass or frequent flyer card, put my (complimentary) checked bag with its RFID baggage tag straight on the machine, 30 seconds later I have my baggage receipt.
1 minute later, I'm on my way through security - I have to take my laptop out of my bag and empty metal from my pockets, but I'm not usually taking off my shoes and there's no LAG restrictions on domestic services. No ID checks either (admittedly a possibility of being stopped for 30 seconds for an "explosives residue" test, though). A minute later, I'm on the other side, and I'm already lining up to buy an only slightly overpriced drink from the cafe.
The whole process is quick enough that when you don't have checked luggage, it's absolutely possible to walk in the front of the terminal and see FINAL CALL on the departures screen, and still make it to the gate in time.
The seat dimensions on domestic aircraft aren't great (and I'm 6'4", so believe me, I know) but it's not really that much more uncomfortable than a car, and it's definitely better than being on a bus for 8 hours. The overhead bin space is way less of a problem when you're on a traditional carrier that unlike the American ones still gives you a complimentary checked bag.
And for anyone who suffers from mild motion sickness (like myself), it's way nicer to be in an aircraft and still be able to read a book than to be on the road.
It's because most airport security in the US is theater - they're trying to reduce the perception of risk.
I'm an American and I travel back to the US as seldom as possible, in large part due to the bullshit you have to go through to travel there. Every time I go back I feel like I'm treated like a criminal, with my only crime being that I need to get on a plane.
And as bad as the normal procedure is, it's much worse if you have to book a flight on short notice - two of the last three trips I've taken to the US were because either a family member had died or was dying. Honestly, when you're just off a 10 hour flight and you don't know whether or not your mother died while you were on the way, the last thing you have patience for is yet another asshole border control guy asking you question after question.
Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about airport security in the US.
I flew in yesterday and there was some kind of a "nation-wide computer-system outage", so there was a 1.5 hour line at border control. Apparently the CBP officers were getting a bit frustrated with all the travelers. My officer made a couple of offhand jokes about the idea of sending me back where I came from. Apparently he didn't like that my visa type was too fancy for my job title.
If the airport did not have American flags all over, I would have thought that I'm in a third-world country.
Meh. I'm sure it's worse for non-Americans, but US border control is more of a hassle for me than any of Europe or China. Africa was pretty bad (they confiscated my passport...?) but otherwise the US is generally the worst.
The US charges $100 to sign up for Global Entry, while Australia is trying to force as many people as possible to use SmartGate with no fee and no registration required...
I travel internationally maybe 6 times a year and on average spend maybe 10 minutes waiting in line and 30 seconds talking to the officer at CBP without global entry.
I've timed it with friends with global entry going through at the same time and they shaved off maybe 5 minutes.
Either ATL, SEA, LAX, JFK, and MSP are way better than average, or global entry isn't worth it except for the tiny percentage of international travelers that commute that way.
Point being, for US citizens, CBP is plenty fast enough without global entry.
I don't think you understand the context of that decision. You do not have a right to enter the USA as a US citizen under all circumstances. You can be denied entry based on suspicious behavior and circumstances, and the border agents have plenty of free reign to interpret that as they will.
Disagree with "Security Theater". Look up older aircraft types in Wikipedia, like "Boeing 727" or "DC-9" and look at their incident lists and why they crashed. Many of them were destroyed in bombings or were hijacked. Nowadays, this kind of crime has become a rarity and it can be attributed to much higher security levels at the aiport. While I oppose total surveillance strongly, this kind of "direct protection" where you look into the eye of the security guys directly might help sometimes.
The TSA does not have to be anywhere near as bad as it is right now. We could have similar levels of security without millimeter wave scanners or pat downs, and without removing shoes, belts, etc.
The reinforcement of cockpit doors and additional sky marshals are what keep that incident list short today.
Of course, every one knows, sky marshals and enforced cockpit doors keep bombs out of the plane...
Of course you can always do better. But compared to Europe, I've found the TSA to be very quick working and quite friendly. I worried a bit after reading so many bad articles, but then wondered that most of them kept smiling and being polite despite their intense work.
But metal detectors aren't that much better than millimeter wave scanners.
Shoes, belts, and taking the laptop out are the only significant pain point that America has that the rest of the world doesn't. And the shoes thing is a the result of someone walking through security with bombs in his shoe, so it's hard to be too critical.
Seconded. Terrible airlines aren't a problem unique to the US, but my experience of travel with major Australian and Asian airlines is consistently good, whilst with US carriers almost universally dismal as given in the GP.
When I hear American and European airline bosses whining about the harsh competition from the "Gulf" airlines such as Emirates, Qatar Airways or Etihad, a voice in my head always yells "why don't you just try to give their level of customer experience in the first place before begging your government to help you provide abysmal service".
And because foreign airlines are generally prohibited from providing domestic service inside the US, which is the substantial majority of the overall market.
I have to agree. And it's a similar experience in Europe and South East Asia.
Maybe this is a generational thing? I've only been traveling for the past 3 years and to me everything seems normal.
Edit: There is one thing that really bugs me: The insecticide spray they release into the cabin on some routes. What's next? Barnaby Joyce personally raiding the cabin looking for traces of Pistol and Boo?
Generational and regional for sure. I've been flying US and Japanese carriers since the late 80's, and (a) Japanese Carriers were always higher quality, but (b) US carriers are much much more crammed than they used to be.
That's fair enough, biosecurity is indeed important. But the cabin spraying specifically has always struck me as a bit cavalier...
It's not hard to imagine a scenario where 10 years later whatever chemical they use is linked to some form of cancer and then a class action lawsuit follows.
It's actually pretty quick in the US, too, despite the bad rap it gets. I have perhaps twice hit 30min security queues at SFO and almost missed my flight, because I like to cut it close and live dangerously.
Typically I arrive about 30-45min before boarding begins and it's no problem whatsoever. I agree most countries I've travelled to have the security lines figured out a lot better in the US, and I just recently got TSA PreCheck so I don't have to take off my shoes and take out my laptop, but it's more about the convenience than the speed.
Is it really that bad? We're scooting around the world are reasonably affordable prices in what is the most statistically safe way to travel. Sure it could be improved but to say it is such a horrible experience...really? Air travel is wonderful and I feel fortunate to have been lucky enough to see many parts of the world. Big picture - it's bloody brilliant!
I'm with you. From Tokyo I can go to multiple countries for less than 200 USD round trip. 300 USD and my choices increase to more than 10 countries.
And the "cost" outside of that is shuffling around an airport listening to an audiobook for a couple of hours, then a few hours of cramped pleasant conversation with a stranger or mediocre naps or reading a book?
It's not the ideal situation, of course, but the last flight I was on I was able to program my first game (shitty breakout clone in Lua and Love2D) from start to finish.
I already posted this further up but I want to add it again as I'm in agreement with you.
Some of the fares are really cheap these days. For example a return flight from Manchester to Dublin booked two weeks in advance is £20. That's a journey that can only be done by flying for one hour or driving for two followed by a three hour ferry.
Or perhaps even better, a return from Manchester to Nürnberg for ~£30 in 2 hours instead of a 14 hour drive plus ferry. The fuel for that alone (not including the ferry) would cost £170.
I just don't understand the complaints!
Booking a few months in advance I can get a return trip to the otherside of the world (Australia) for under £700 and get there in less than 24 hours. I find that incredibly cheap and would be mindblowing just 20 years ago.
I don't disagree with you but I don't think deaths per mile is a good way to compare modes of transportation. The car/truck numbers include intra-city miles driven for a start. If you can narrow it down to accidents on interstates I think it'd be better.
My guess is that it wouldn't matter much, since accidents at intra-city speeds are rarely fatal.
Accidents on country roads are often fatal though, so maybe that is where the difference would come from (and country driving is not an alternative to flying commercial).
>In 2014, the most recent year for which vehicle miles traveled data are available, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was 2.4 times higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.81 in rural areas compared with 0.74 in urban areas).
I understand this statistic and get why it's often referenced, but how about this question instead? "Per accident, which has higher likelihood of death?"
I feel that's what worries people. Ya, per mile traveled its less likely, but per accident I imagine is a much different story.
"Probability of death conditional on an accident" sounds like a statistic designed to fool people who really just care about the probability of death, preying on a cognitive error.
But that statistic is pointless because you're so much more unlikely to get into an accident. It's irrelevant that you're more likely to die in a plane crash than a car crash. By that logic, you should never drive more than 5 miles an hour, because with each mile an hour you increase your speed, you're more likely to be in a fatal accident.
That makes it worse actually - not only are you more likely to die in a car per mile, but you are many more times likely than THAT higher number to get injured.
It may be what worries people, but that's only because people are irrational. That number is utterly meaningless. If you use that number to decide safety, then stubbing your toe before you go BASE jumping makes it safer!
you you're saying that people prefer to be maimed more and so would choose driving over flying because there's less chance of them being maimed when they fly?
But that's an inherently wrong way of looking at it. If you're traveling somewhere in a plane vs on the road, you're way more likely to die. Even if you factor own your own human error (but not others').
Seems to be very different in Europe. Here, I can book flights with basically any app online, fares are usually very competitive (cheaper than train/car mostly) and I can arrive at the airport 1hr before take-off. Even small airports that only serve no-frills airlines tend to be very nice by now (e.g. London Stansted).
And I even like to fly Ryanair, the service isn't great but they're basically always on time and boarding/de-boarding is much faster than with other airlines (don't understand why only no-frills airlines use both doors for boarding). Don't need food&drinks for a 1-2hr flight, and leg room is enough for me for that time.
I don't really know where ticket prices in the US come from. I often find cheaper fares (for the same distance) in Europe than the US, even with airlines offering free alcohol on board and lounges that are way better than what you find in the US (domestic lounges in the US are laughable).
I am continually frustrated with how European trains are more expensive than flying. I remember taking a lot more trains 20 years ago and I miss that. I need to do a lot of travel the next weeks and I also have a lot of reading to get done, and would give anything to be able to afford the 3x times prices of trains, but alas I'll be flying because it's a 75€ flight vs 150€ fast train. Of course there is always the 15€ night bus but I can't handle 12 hours without being able to stand up and stretch at will, which even at least a long-haul jet allows.
Not only are they more expensive, sometimes you pay about the same for the train as the entire flight. It costs me 40 EUR to go by train to a cheap airport. That airport has flights around that price! As a result, I do not usually fly from there (the 40 EUR plus additional time involved).
I always take into account the cost of going to the airport; the far away cheap airport often loses out (as saving e.g. 10 EUR isn't worth the hassle).
Going anywhere further than just the airport by train is expensive. I try to take the bus until 2.5 hour trips. After that I try to avoid unless you can fly. Pretty ridiculous!
+1, love arriving downtown when taking a Euro train... sadly many corporate policies require booking flights OVER trains due to negotiated travel deals in Europe.
Depends on the route, and that wasn't the best example I agree. It's more a question of not understanding how the airlines can afford to cut prices so deeply, and yet trains remain expensive. I'm not clear on the economics, which leaves me frustrated due to not understanding.
>Literally everything is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is that it makes long distance and overseas travel logistically possible on an acceptable timescale.
Yeah, just that. Merely taking like 7 hours to get from the US to Europe sitting on a chair in the sky and being fed -- as opposed to a trip that used to take months or weeks, people got sick and/or died in the way, and unless you were rich you were getting terrible food (or what you brought yourself) and bunk beds.
>and the basic human dignity of having personal space
It used to be worse is not really a good argument. If you use this reasoning the current state is good. Without being able to question the current state, improvements will be limited or none.
Not accepting the current state of things is a good way to improve things. Instead of comparing to the past, compare it to other regions. One commenter compared USA to Europe and said USA is significantly worse, irrespective of how things were loads of years ago.
>It used to be worse is not really a good argument. If you use this reasoning the current state is good. Without being able to question the current state, improvements will be limited or none.
The other side of this is that without seeing things in perspective we might not appreciate the huge improvements that went into it.
And we might even lament for "first world problems" making mountains out of molehills, or take everything for granted...
For one, because I'm not restricted in my argumentation to what the GP compared.
But, more precisely, because I found the kind GP's lamentations over the top when speaking of modern air travel, and think that it would only be justified if GP was indeed speaking about pre-airplane travel.
I really don't think most software engineers are flying business class. Any significant distance that would merit it, is SERIOUS money. Even for someone making six figures.
All the companies I've worked for have had travel policies where more than N hours airborne meant an automatic upgrade. I don't know how normal it is, but it's not crazy.
Not normal. A typical bay to Asia business class ticket I see is $6k+. At most conferences small talk is around your travel there and everyone else I've talked to from US companies that was a software engineer was lucky to get a bump to economy plus.
That's fine, and the company I work for has a similar policy, it actually used to be based on just how long a single flight is. Today, you'll get that if you're an executive with serious flight time. With that said, OP did not mention a company shelling out for this, only that the were a software engineer. Which is nonsense.
For domestic travel within the US, first class -- especially booked well in advance -- is often surprisingly cheap, and cheap buy-ups are routinely offered, too (for example, I'm looking at a round-trip for about four months from now for a conference I'll attend, and I'm seeing first class offered for about $250 round-trip).
International business class is expensive, yes, typically on the order of $8,000 to $10,000 for a round-trip ticket. But international is the only place airlines can get away with charging that kind of fare and have people pay it, so that's what they'll continue to do. And when compared to other things people in software-developer income brackets often spend money on, even that isn't particularly gigantic; it's just all in one go instead of spread out over many small purchases the way, say, use of Uber and Lyft would be.
I have a friend who works for Apple and they get dirt cheap business class tickets to China. He says usually around $3000. For a human who has to pay human prices (eg, not a corporate deal), the multiple from coach is much greater.
For the purposes of this comment I just Google searched "SFO to Shanghai". The default is Jan 21-Feb 3 (so you're not paying a last-minute-booking penalty).
The prices are insanely cheap somehow, but the multiple holds up.
$527 economy
$1999 premium economy
$2853 business
$5340 first
I would fly premium economy every time if it existed on most airlines and the multiple was 'only' 50%. What normal human can afford 4x the price for a couple more inches of elbow and legroom? It's far greater than the cost of the actual space.
I tend to assume business will be three times the cost of economy; I suspect SFO to Shanghai is a weird route from a price perspective, much like London to NYC; very few landing spots available. I'd also consider Jan 21-Feb 3 to be pretty last minute.
AMS-IAD (two airports with good capacity) for the default Google Flight dates show 45k for economy, 99k for PE, and 120k (all INR) for business, all on reasonable airlines
The difference between business and economy plus is an order or magnitude, at the very least. My statement stands, just because someone is a software engineer, absolutely does not mean they are spending $9000 to fly to Japan business class. 6% of their salary on a single flight is just crazy talk.
As a tall person, I would happily pay 33% more for a seat with 33% more pitch. (Which is a great deal for the airline because I would be paying to haul empty space that weighs nothing, rather than the weight of [human+bags+seat]/3.
Incorrect. Lifting cargo costs fuel which is one of the largest expenses in commercial aviation. If someone is willing to pay full fare for empty space, that's a great deal.
30 minutes to wake up/get ready, 1 hour to the airport, arrive 90 minutes early, 30 minutes to de-board, 30 minutes for luggage/rental car and I'm at 4 hours on top of flight time. Most of that time I'm bothered by what I'm being put through - whether it's a TSA line, one of several airline lines, poor customer service, overpriced ... everything, and the general unhealthy atmosphere I'd happily commit an additional 2 hours to the drive. I get to be in my own car and avoid all kinds of frustration in favor of zoning out on music I enjoy.
That's right. If anything flying can be the most dignified way of traveling. I just came back from a trip to Europe and was upgraded so I had access to a lounge with "free" massages, nice food and drinks and then boarded a plane where I had a seat that could be made into a bed and also had a table my wife and I could eat together at. And then enjoy the cheese cart and have a seat at the bar for another cocktail before laying down for a cat nap.
The point is airlines are giving people options. Flying is unbelievably cheap if you want it to be but you get what you pay for - a safe flight in a moderately uncomfortable seat. People wanted cheap and they're getting it.
I wish more airlines offered more classes of service though. Flying United to Europe you either have crummy economy (exit rows are fine but the service still is poor) or rather expensive first. More options for mid-tier service where you have larger, more comfortable seating and nice food options similar to Virgins "Premium Economy" service which is is quite nice at a reasonable ask for those that find a couple hundred dollars extra worth it. I find it worth it for 8 hour+ flights to have some extra comfort so I feel better when landing.
You and the grandparent are dancing around the increased costs. I just checked prices for the last flight I took to Europe, and the difference between economy and first class is (roughly) TEN TIMES. Hey, if $9,000 is to your budget what $900 is to mine, awesome! I've had first class once, for business, and, sure, it was great. I just wish they'd give us another couple of inches of legroom in economy. Just 2 inches! Take out, like 2 or 3 rows, and expand. I'm 6' and 250 lbs, and when someone reclines in front of me, the seat is literally 6 inches from my face! If they'd charge the extra for taking out those rows, the increase to the prices of the rest of the tickets would be minimal. I think they cram us in as tightly as humanly possible (literally) so that they can cajole more people into the first-class cabin and it's attendant price. It's not just awful; it's manipulative!
I'm with you. I have issues with the literal class dynamic of airlines regardless. But when I look at how much more I'd be paying per hour for a modestly more comfortable chair, I quickly get to "no way, not ever" territory. Hell, when I had my wisdom teeth out, it was only $400/hr for the general anesthetic and I said no to that. If I ever spend thousands just for my personal comfort, it's going to be on something I end up owning and using for years.
I thought it was fine. It was only 45 minutes, and I thought it was all pretty interesting. Thanks to the local anesthetic, there was very little pain. The parts I really didn't like all came over the next few days, but ice cream and video were enough to get me through.
Oh, I had only local anesthetic for mine, too. I got confused. I thought you meant without any anesthetic. It wasn't bad at all. I was just surprised at how much force they used. It sounded like hell, too, but no big deal.
i had mine taken out with local+nitrous (as opposed to going completely under) because the anesthesiologist wasn't in that day (apparently an oral surgeon can do the gas, but not the knockout drugs). i remember the whole thing. it was surprising how much force they used but other than that it was fine. i remember i had my ipod with me and tripped out to music while getting my face drilled.
as an adult it's probably better because there's no recovery time, they just take the nitrous away and you're good to drive yourself home (or to the pharmacy, to pick up your pain meds that you're definitely going to need) 2 minutes later.
the 2-3 weeks following extraction are 1000x worse than the actual procedure, which isn't bad at all.
Interesting, I didn't find the recovery very bad at all. I had general anesthetics and a script for oxycontin, but my mom was overprotective and wouldn't let me take anything more than ibuprofen. I don't recall even needing the ibuprofen after a day or two.
I think they cram us in as tightly as humanly possible (literally) so that they can cajole more people into the first-class cabin and it's attendant price.
Domestic first-class cabins in the US have been shrinking (fewer seats), for what it's worth. And while international business-class cabins still usually have 20+ seats in them (and sometimes much more), you're correct in noting that they're much more expensive in relation.
The economics of running an airline hasn't changed. People still -- despite everything they complain about as a consequence -- shop exclusively for the lowest possible fare they can find anywhere, and damn the legroom and extra fees. Airlines, which need to maximize the revenue coming from the back end of the plane in order to stay profitable, know this and have responded by squeezing in more seats (witness the number of carriers now going to ten-across seating on international aircraft, switching to "slimline" seats and shaving more inches out of the legroom in order to add another row or two) and unbundling as much as they can into separate upsells to preserve that low advertised fare.
> Just 2 inches! Take out, like 2 or 3 rows, and expand.
The problem is that increasing the other basic economy tickets by the lost revenue (even all seats regardless of class) prices the seats out of competition, not to mention the costs in actually ripping the seats out, moving all the other seats, and getting the plane recertified/inspected.
> when someone reclines in front of me, the seat is literally 6 inches from my face
Serious question: would 8 inches be any better?
> I think they cram us in as tightly as humanly possible (literally) so that they can cajole more people into the first-class cabin and it's attendant price. It's not just awful; it's manipulative!
I think the intersection of people who can afford first class but who would consider taking basic economy with 8" of room but not 6" is exceedingly small.
>I just wish they'd give us another couple of inches of legroom in economy. Just 2 inches! Take out, like 2 or 3 rows, and expand. I'm 6' and 250 lbs, and when someone reclines in front of me, the seat is literally 6 inches from my face!
They offer this service on most airlines, it's called economy plus on United.
I love a couple inches more wide. Maybe instead of a 3-3 row, they could sell a 2-3 row. Or just make the damn planes wider.
Even when I was skin and bones, 169 lbs and 6'2", I couldn't comfortably fit in these 17 inch wide seats. My shoulders are too wide. Now that I've plumped up, it's basically impossible.
Hell, I'd just appreciate a thin seat divider that clearly makes sure I'm not spilling into someone else's room.
It's not always that much more expensive but yeah sometimes the asks are crazy. A year ago I booked a flight on Virgin Atlantic in Economy and they offered an upgrade to "Upper Class" (their term) for $500 roundtrip to Europe per person. That was great value.
United has "Economy Plus" which is more legroom. I'm 6'2" and I find it fine. My advice is to upgrade to that and pay extra for the exit row. If there are 2 exit rows then book the one behind the one in front. You can't recline into an exit row so with the second set of exit rows you get a ton of space and no one that can recline into you.
I always upgrade to economy plus but it's only marginally worth it. Yeah, I can actually get things out of my bag (instead of smashing my face against the seat in front of me and fumbling blindly), but it doesn't solve the elbow room issue which is the real problem on planes for anyone of average build.
I was able to score business class from Beijing to LA for $2k one way; at the time the lowest one way ticket I could find was $1500 (same as round trip, and we weren't coming back), so it worked well, especially with a pregnant wife.
The article's argument is based on a known-false assumption.
It assumes that people will automatically buy the next-highest fare bucket in order to avoid the horrors of Basic Economy, but the history of the airline business in the US over the past couple decades suggests that the vast majority of travelers will complain about how horrible the low-fare experience is, then book it anyway.
You missed the point—when airlines introduce Basic Economy fares, they don't drop the price, they instead drop services. So at best, you're paying the same for poorer service, otherwise you're paying more for the same service. Either way, the cost of those services is going up.
The article offered only one anecdote of a previous lowest fare price becoming the basic-economy fare price. Meanwhile, it presents as its main thesis that most people will spend more to not get basic economy, which is demonstrably false.
The thing is, it doesn't matter if people will spend more or not. Say you regularly purchase something, and pay $10/lb for it. And you usually buy a 6 pound package. So you spend $60.
And the one day you go into the store, and they tell you "We just introduced a new Basic Economy package!". It's still only $60, but now it's 5 pounds instead of 6. Or, for $12 more, you can upgrade to your previous 6 pound package.
May you pay more to upgrade, maybe you pay the same—but either way, what used to be $10/lb is now $12/lb. The price went up.
I think you're missing the fact that they were offering better service than the discount airlines but at the same price. It was the only way to compete when most people who travel infrequently purchase strictly on cheapest price. In effect they were offering a better service than people were paying for because they had to.
Now they are finally updating their seating and policy to be in-line with what the discount airlines offer. So they aren't charging more for economy. They're pricing it inline with the level of service you get, something they weren't able to do before.
> Flying United to Europe you
> either have crummy economy
> or rather expensive first
Mmm, actually it's economy or business, whatever brand name they're giving it — it'll come up as a business fare in flight booking systems. Genuine First is becoming rarer and rarer (excepting what US domestic routes describe as that), as more and more airlines follow Virgin Atlantic's original lead of a business class (very almost) as good as First, and no First. Even the ME3 are cutting back (Etihad's The Residence as an exception) — Qatar have a First Class cabin only on their A380, and have nixed it from their A350s, Dreamliners, 777s etc
Yeah I was just using "First Class" as an enhanced level of service where you can expect a bed, decent food options served on actual plates and other niceties like a comfort kit and other things.
I think they called it "Business First" before they switched to "Polaris".
Premium Economy cabins (better than domestic first class but not as nice as lie-flat business class seats) are coming to both Delta and American international flights in 2017.
That sounds excellent. I'm a United person (easiest airport to get to and they dominate it - Delta doesn't even have a terminal. EWR if you're interested) and I'm not sure they do. They are rolling out a new first class service which looks nice but no idea on improving to a Premium Economy cabin.
Delta has impressed me lately. I may make the switch and just deal with the extra haul to JFK which is about 20 minutes more for me if United can't or won't improve their lousy, outdated aircraft for international flights to Europe.
United does fly nicely outfitted aircraft to Asia and Australia but I don't get out that way nearly as much.
United has not announced plans that I know of to add premium economy, but both United and AA nowadays tend to copy Delta, since Delta's been making a lot of money.
Of the big three legacy carriers, Delta is currently the best combination of price and reliability. You know they want a bit of extra money for the slightly nicer experiences, and you know what you're going to get out of it.
For international travel, though, I've been starting to avoid US carriers entirely in favor of flying the other country's airline (which is something you can do when living near a major international hub -- SFO, in my case). Often it's another small step up, and sometimes it's a big step up, compared to the US airlines.
I travel enough where it only makes sense to use a domestic carrier. United is the most convenient for me so that's that.
You're right though, airlines like British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are quite a bit more nice. United treats me pretty well as I have the highest status, however.
I live close to JFK, and rarely fly out of EWR for similar reasons as you, in the opposite direction. The Delta terminals are pretty nice; terminal 4 is looong, but much nicer than terminal 1.
Sadly the Delta product is more of a rebranding of Comfort Plus... more food service but not anything very comfortable. If they would just offer the equivalent of domestic Delta First as a premium economy that would be a start for me!
Those upgrades don't exist for normal people anymore. They used to upgrade people just for the hell of it. I've got status on an airline and STILL never get upgrades. You've gotta travel constantly to ever be eligible for an upgrade.
You've basically got to fly a lot AND fly full fare refundable tickets (easily twice as much as regular tickets). So it's basically only useful for business travelers who are on business.
Once I got on United Gold, I could pick weird flights (undesireable times, maybe the shittier airport) that would automatically upgrade a full ticket to first class. But a full fare economy is basically the same price as a non-refundable first class. So it only works if a business is picking up the tab.
On most US domestic airlines, so-called "first class" gives me what other airlines call at most a premium economy seat, and does not improve the overall quality of customer service.
It's also become substantially cheaper as fuel prices have tanked over the last few years.
Lower fuel costs means budget airlines can compete more aggressively, and major carriers have to lower their own prices to stay competitive. So they have to cut corners other ways to maintain growth.
For me, the upside of much cheaper travel beats these downsides. If you travel light and educate yourself about fees, airline travel really isn't so bad.
It could be worse. They could be putting people in boxes and treating them as live cargo. However, that would be an improvement over the alternative of mailing oneself:
I am the same. I've got a ~10 hour drive later this week and I never even seriously thought about flying. Much rather take my own car, even if door-to-door is a few hours more. When we someday have fully-autonomous cars I predict a vast collapse in short-mid haul air travel.
The reality is all of those issues you mention are largely alleviated for frequent fliers, and I don't think that's a surprise given the revenues they generate.
When I fly I get a free upgrade to economy plus (it ain't much but the extra legroom is nice) and occasional upgrades to first class, a free check bag, priority boarding, and priority security. And that's only with basic status.
Checking in online and packing only carry-on means I can breeze through pretty quickly. Add a trusted traveler program and it's almost like flying 20 years ago.
My guess is the goal of airlines is to encourage frequent flier loyalty by making conveniences a part of the status benefits, and then squeeze the occasional travellers for more dollars at the same time.
Interestingly this is very US specific. the big European legacy carriers have way worse frequent flyer programs. Living in Germany, the obvious choice of FFP would be Lufthansa where status is incredibly hard to obtain without flying Business or First and then the benefits are small then with US programs - for example no complimentary updates. Lufthansa rather flies an empty Business cabin then upgrading someone. (With the exception that you get domestic lounge access too)
This is not a solution for almost anyone, but I've found that flying is the one thing where being 5ft2 is really extremely very beneficial. Makes flying totally awesome.
Even economy plus is weird because it just means I can't reach the touch screen without leaning forward :D
You can solve most of the other problems by being super late to your flight. Cuts the waiting and queuing but does mean you have to check your bags. Often this is okay or even preferable because less stuff to haul around airport.
Oh and noise cancellation headphones have changed my life. You can actually hear the stewardess when they talk to you because your ears aren't worn out from the engine noise. It's amazing! Easily the best $300 I ever spent in terms of improving airplanes.
Last time I flew overseas, there was a 5', petite lady next to me. She put her feet in the safety brochure pocket in the seat in front of her, curled up in her seat, and went to sleep for the duration. As a big guy who can't sleep in public, I was SOOOOO jealous.
I do that. Sometimes one can run into the rare problem of too much legroom with this. Due to shorter legs, sitting normally for extended time is quite uncomfortable due to pressure on the legs just above the knees.
My partner is much shorter than me, and we fly together a lot; the upgrades matter so much more to me due to the room. First class is almost too big for her, but it's so much nicer for me. Delta's economy plus is big enough to be comfy. Other flights are tolerable, but rough, especially at the frequency I travel.
No, they basically don't exist. I'm United Mileage Plus Silver and have never seen an upgrade (although now I get 'free' Economy Plus which just adds a few inches of legroom to the terrible experience). I've had friends put in for first class upgrades for me a number of times and never once seen one.
A "normal" person who doesn't rack up tens of thousands of miles a year will absolutely never see an upgrade.
It Depends. I will say that I get upgraded to first class on domestic flights all the time, but have only gotten two or three international upgrades.
In Delta's case, at least, it depends on how many seats are free, and how you rank. The ranking is based on all kinds of stuff. So for less-flown and less-upgraded routes, it's easy to upgrade. Other routes have more people flying first class by paying and more competition for the free upgrades.
>Shopping for tickets. Checking in. Security. Waiting. Boarding the plane and fighting for overhead bin space. Seat dimensions. Lavatories. Literally everything is terrible.
I've been flying for over 30 years.
Shopping for tickets is easier. Before you had to go to a travel agency or wait in line at the airport. Now you just buy online.
Checking in has gotten a lot better. The last so many times I flew, I did not even have a wait. Go to the kiosk, get your tickets, and not even a wait to go to a person and have them checked in.
Fighting for overhead bin space is the same. Seat dimensions are roughly the same. Lavatories are the same.
> Given the choice to drive for 8 hours or fly for 2 I always chose to drive.
Hopefully self-driving or at least largely autonomous cars at an affordable price will make this a no-brainer for everything except trans-oceanic flights. My car has a seat that's more comfortable than any seat I've had on an airplane so far.
This is happening in many other industries that suffer from commodization / lack product differentiation while also suffering from comparative price shopping. It's a race to the bottom to get listed first and make contact with a customer then it's all about upsell, crosssell, discounts, etc.
I understand it is a competitive business but this is the result of consolidation and less competition. Delta, United, American, they're all awful. Who would have thought South West would become the Premier Airline to travel on.
While they continue to reduce capacity, load factors increase. They have everything down to a fine science using Big Data and their Algo's to come up with how many seats to oversell, how many folks they can leave behind, what flights to cancel, etc. They have completely embraced this business model of monetizing every triviality that they can possible get away with. The people traveling are just units, not even customers anymore. Everything is about squeezing every penny they can out of every seat mile and who gives a shit whether you are treated like a human. It's not like you have many options. It's either Shit A, Shit B or Shit C, pick one.
How I look forward to self driving cars that can get 800-1000 miles on a single charge. I can sit in the comfort of my vehicle and read, sight see, rest, or even work as I travel to my destination. I would gladly sit in the car for 10-12 hours instead of flying.
It's peculiar how stereotypical some of the Americans in the comments are. It seems like there's a prevailing attitude of not wanting to "subsidize" others. Whether that includes people who want to bring luggage, people who would like a meal on the long flight or those that don't travel very often - does not matter, what matters is that it's the other people, who are not you.
I think that that same attitude is responsible for the current state of the higher education and healthcare in the US. As long as the interested parties can present the "us versus them" outlook to the public ("them" is of course poor/lazy/lower class people), they can get away with lots and lots.
So people should have to buy more expensive services, bundled in a way they don't like, want or need, just so others can have the price for those services hidden in the overall price? Why?
If somebody wants to carry a lot of luggage on, or eat a bunch of in-flight meals, that's fine. Doesn't mean they get to demand that these things be included always, for everybody. We could demand that complimentary champagne and cheesecake be included in a flight; that doesn't mean that it wouldn't cost money or that people who didn't want it wouldn't be paying for the people who do.
It doesn't help people, especially those with less money, to demand that only comprehensive and luxurious services be available.
Are you replying only to the comment, or to the article as well? Because the article makes the point that these basic fares are simply a way to increase prices.
As for your reaction to the comment: you make really great points while maybe neglecting to acknowledge that many services are cheaper at scale. So by providing them to everyone as part of a bundle, the overall cost is way lower for everyone.
I was responding to both. I simply do not agree with the idea that, if they were required to bundle these services together at some set level of service, that this would somehow make airlines unable to increase the prices. What I suggest is happening here is that the airlines would have increased their bundled prices, but aware of how price-sensitive flyers are, and how many of them are willing to forgo extra services, they've decided to unbundle instead.
I mean, what's stopping them from just raising prices for bundled services? Nothing, besides competition. The fact that these services can be paid for separately is not some way for them to "get you" somehow, it's just unbundling.
Yes, there's theoretically economies of scale for some things. But there's also a lot of potential advantages to pricing specific services - especially for things like luggage, where capacity per passenger often has hard limits. If there really are economies of scale, I suspect the airlines themselves will find them more effectively than blanket regulations requiring a particular service level.
The reply by "whiddershins" is spot on, but I will elaborate a bit. The first point is that you are very quick to label all paid services as "luxury". Sure, champagne is a luxury, but what the companies are doing is taking what used to be a "normal" service, stripping it of anything they can think of and declaring it the new "normal" and all those stripped thing a "luxury". I don't think being able to sit without discomfort or choose a seat is really a "luxury".
Regarding the example he gave - I am not sure how the IPhone applies, but I think another example would be the healthcare. When everyone pays for his own healthcare through a system of private insurers you get the horror that is American healthcare. When people just pay taxes, which collectively pay for medical expenses you get Western European system.
I mean, it's all luxury as far as i'm concerned - and in the right of the provider to decide on packages. If they want to offer terrible seating for not-cheaper prices, let them - the market (consumers) should be able to decide not to use them.
This is a very different argument to me than healthcare though. In my world view, healthcare and education have widespread, socially beneficial properties. I pay my local taxes to fund a highschool that i don't have kids in, because i don't want morons in the work force next year. Likewise, i want to pay more taxes for healthy educated people in the work force, because i feel it benefits me.
This is very different than how much an airline is charging for their service. An airline is no different than a hotdog vendor to me, and they should be able to charge whatever they want for their services.
Granted, i will admit that there is a bit of a slippery slope - a good example being Comcast. I loathe Comcast's business practices because we (many of us) feel trapped by them, as we only have one choice, due to the difficult nature of laying pipes. Same goes for airlines i imagine. If all airlines started to gouge us, many people can't simply drive instead - so clearly some regulation is needed in the case of airlines that the hotdog vendor doesn't have to worry about.
I am not labelling all paid services as luxuries. But some are, and different people will consider different things luxuries. I mean, what is discomfort? (Should seats be leather, say? Should they recline? How far?) How much is choosing a seat worth? Some people really like an aisle, some like a window, some don't care. When you decide that a particular service is required to be included, you're saying that people that don't want it will have to pay for it anyways. I don't see why that is the default argument that doesn't have to be defended, while not having to pay for something you don't want is the idea that has a high burden of argument.
The heart of the argument made in the article is that somehow, by unbundling services that were bundled, airlines are somehow able to raise prices above what they were otherwise able to do. I don't think that's true at all.
I mean, I sure like a pop and a box of chocolate-covered raisins when I go to the movies. Therefore I demand that all movie tickets include food.
I like to watch streaming videos on my phone. Therefore I demand that all phone plans include unlimited data.
I like big comfortable seats and laptop plugs when I travel on the inter-city train. Therefore I demand that municipal buses include these things.
You see where this goes?
And US healthcare is totally not the same. Firstly, the majority of US healthcare expenditures are tax-funded, about 65%, mostly through Medicare, Medicaid, tax subsidies and other programs. Secondly, it is effectively cartelized by the government, through incentives that make it extremely tax-advantageous to get healthcare through employers, to limits on the training and numbers of doctors that drive up prices, to now, a system of exchanges that require that people purchase insurance from approved insurers at government-set prices. It is so, so incredibly far from "everyone pays for his own healthcare through a system of private insurers".
Your healthcare analogy isn't good. The American health care system is dysfunctional for a variety of reasons; privatization is one aspect. There are efficiency gains to centralization under a public system, but it's not a sufficient condition.
There are plenty of countries that operate on a more private (less regulated) platform that have excellent health care opportunities, e.g. Thailand. Likewise, there are plenty of countries that operate on a publicly-funded model that have inferior healthcare, e.g. Russian Federation.
Right, the argument in the article is based on one anrcdotal instance of an airline not lowering prices when they introduced Basic Economy to a market. The interpretatoon of the evidence is intellectually lazy; who's to say the two alternatives were not (1) raising prices for everyone or (2) introducing Basic Economy to maintain the current price.
And yes, original commenter, I'm American and I'd prefer an unbundled pricing model because I don't use or need most of the things that get bundled into the price.
The idea that an airline can simply include many more services while maintaining roughly the same prices seems very false: there would never have been budget airlines in the first place if it worked.
Are you saying you can get the same prices for components as Apple does, regardless of quantity?
Or are you willing to admit that Apple, given its demand for greater quantities of components, is able to obtain better pricing for the components than an average Joe?
And would you further entertain the idea of an airline buying, say, peanuts, is in a similar position to pay less than the average consumer, given they are purchasing in much greater quantities?
> Because the article makes the point that these basic fares are simply a way to increase prices.
That's not inherently a bad thing. Companies are allowed to raise prices. If the prices are noncompetitive, then people will choose other carriers.
Flight is not a right, nor is flight at a given price point. If there is room for cheaper airlines to capture fares at $300 while AA/DL/etc are charging $350, they will do so.
As a non-USA person here I was also amazed with some of these comments. But I am not sure it is only about "subsidizing" others (which it also is). If you read a lot of these comments, they go into great lengths into describing their particular live choices, their very deliberate little decisions they make while traveling all the time, and how these makes them special. I feel that there is another side to this individualism: the pride on ones choices, on being unique and in some way, standing out of the masses through their clever use of their options.
It reminded me about another thing that surprised me in the USA: food menus are lengthy, and everything is customizable! You have to choose ingredients, topping, side, everything!
I guess, for a lot of USAmericans this feels empowering. Interestingly, coming from the other side of the Atlantic, it had the opposite effect on me: I felt overwhelmed, that I was required to do make decisions and do too much thinking, that at the end, it was the chef's job to offer me a menu with dishes that make sense and taste good! In fact in Europe, good restaurants tend to have very few options, you go there because you acknowledge that the person that designed the menu knows more about those dishes than you...
I guess, I am also ok about "subsidizing" others... I know that some days I will eat at the flight, some days I won't, some days I will need extra luggage, some days I won't... It is just easier if we don't have to go through all the bureaucracy of managing these decisions. It is cheaper too, since the accounting and planning becomes easier. Some people might be getting be getting more or less out of it, but it evens out with time anyways. I can get my "feeling of importance" by other means.
There is something more this might show us about the "customization" vs "just works" in how different people prefer their software. But I will think about this some other day...
>It is just easier if we don't have to go through all the bureaucracy of managing these decisions.
Yep. American business seems to have convinced the population to recategorize management and decision-making onto ourselves. It's a perfect example of "shadow work": work that was moved from a company's employees to the customer in order to de-skill the job.
I'm theoretically fine with taking a trip by booking a flight, booking a rental car, and booking a hotel room all separately. I did it just this past summer. Being able to give some loose descriptions of what we needed to a travel agent and then just get an email asking for final approval would have been kinda nice, though, especially if it makes economies of scale available so that lower-end customers can have nice things too.
As it was, booking my honeymoon was a bit of a hassle.
American here but I'm with you on the food menu thing. This is a red hot issue for me. People who make food should have an opinion about how it should taste. I hate all this "have it your way" bullshit. The menu for this salad place gives me panic attacks: http://choptsalad.com/
Culturally we've lost the idea of tastemakers, whether it's food, music, film, or whatever. Everyone's free to enjoy what they like and having any kind of sophistication is faux pas.
Having strong opinions about what is good and what sucks will quickly get the ire of others.
Oh, very apt! I think the highly developed American individualism is a fitting thing to bring up in this discussion. Good point about the luggage\food, which you need only in some cases.
I guess meticulously optimizing every aspect of the flight could be seen as a way of staying ahead of the curve and in this context not wanting to pay for someone else's baggage is understandable. If you do think of yourself as just an average "customer" (and majority of other does) then the costs will even out in the end.
What is wrong with only wanting to pay for the services which you consume?
I want to fly in a bigger seat, with checked luggage and a carry-on, eat, and have an alcoholic beverage or two. If someone wants to be on the same place with a single bag, the smallest seat, and not eat or drink, they should absolutely have a much cheaper experience than me.
That's not classism, it's common sense. I shouldn't get free drinks at their expense.
One problem is that the airlines are both unbundling services AND using price discrimination to nickle and dime people. The extra services are marked up with crazy margins.
The people paying these fees are actually subsidizing the person who pay the vanilla fare.
It costs essentially nothing for the airline to let me pick a seat, but they now want 20 dollars a flight to do it.
If you wanted to refine loss of revenue as a cost, you'd have to account for how many actually pay it. If 10% of the flight pays the seat tool, it only costs 2 bucks, not 20.
Nothing wrong at all if it was really working that way, i.e. that someone would really get a cheaper price than a normal package. The article does make a point that it's not really what is happening, instead the companies are squeezing the money out of customers in any way they can.
In the end everyone wants to make money, but at certain point it starts bordering on unethical, this squeezing of money out of customers. I am pointing out that if one spins these practices in a certain way, one can even get the customers to support the initiatives which are not in their interests.
> the companies are squeezing the money out of customers in any way they can.
Or: "the companies are pricing competitively while maintaining a profit. Take a look at Southwest's profit margin.[0] 7-10% is nothing, especially when you look at the huge maintenance and regulatory costs surrounding commercial carriers. At 7% an unexpectedly bad month could be disastrous. I mean look at the margins moving into the 10th anniversary of 9/11. From 3.9% profit to 3.3% loss.
> I am pointing out that if one spins these practices in a certain way, one can even get the customers to support the initiatives which are not in their interests.
It's in my interest to get everything for free but that's not realistic, is it?
You're acting like the airlines are a dark cabal of billionaires trying to trick passengers into giving away money for nothing in return. It's totally within their right to raise prices for whatever reason they want, and it's totally within passengers' rights to shop elsewhere. There are a lot of carriers at every point on the price spectrum.
Except the airlines use a geographic hub system, so outside of (let's generously pick a large number) a dozen large cities you do NOT have the freedom to pick from a large set of carriers that go to the places you're trying to go. Much more the case if your time sensitivities eliminate layovers.
I did a ton of travel in my 20s out of Denver, where I was a United frequent flyer. In my experience they have one of the smallest seat pitches in the industry, which even though I'm 6'4" didn't matter much at the time due to the free upgrades, but when I started travelling less, I simply didn't have a lot of freedom to just go to American on a whim.
It's majestically reasonable to want the fee structure to cause people to economize on legitimately costly stuff. Consider:
"Global warming is causing problems that we need to fix, and that needs money. How should we get the money:
A) Fixed, $1000/person head tax
B) Carbon tax"
I think you'd be pretty livid about paying the same, regardless of how much you economize on your carbon emissions.
Health care is a special case because a majority of the ballooning-cost stuff is randomly distributed and it's effectively set up as (social) insurance, where everyone is paying for the risk of needing that care.
Not sure why you call us vs them an American sentiment. I think you'll find equally many Americans pissed off about this because it is an experiment in how much you have to abuse poor people to successfully extract more profit out of the lower middle class.
We already have people dying of deep vein thrombosis due to inadequate leg room. Now they want to take away the restroom. When train systems of old did that, people started defecating in the cabin. That and overcrowding spread disease. I'm sure the thread of cholera will get another 10% of the population to pony up $50.
Next step (based on railway abuses) is to pipe "more" oxygen into first and economy plus. (The rails stopped covering the economy section in some areas, but I don't think airlines could get away with depressurizing coach).
After that: Livestock!
(I had a reference for this railway stuff, it was a famous historcal book. Can't find it right now.)
Also, the US air system used to be heavily regulated and much nicer from a customer service perspective. A lot of Americans still remember those days.
My first flight where snacks cost really pissed me off. If I buy a pack of nutter butters (which is bigger than the provided snack) and a 24 pack of coke and sell them to break even. It's going to cost a whopping 83 cents per person. That doesn't include buying in bulk if I were a large company. So I don't really get this "subsidizing" mindset. Pretty much everyone takes a snack w/ drink. Haven't seen anyone skip it so I know a lot of people want it.
Meanwhile, anyone flying in economy / coach is being heavily subsidized by those who paid for business / first. (Of course, a lot of those seats go to free upgrades now...)
There are 12 comments and 350 million Americans. That represents about .00000000034% Americans.
But continue to jump to conclusions and create generalizations based on your limited worldview, because that's not at all the same attitude responsible for the current state of humanity.
I'm in America and i completely agree with his view. You're being overly sensitive.
Generalizations aren't bad, they're just one persons understanding of a group of people. Clearly, based on his/her experiences he is able to generalize the above statement, and that isn't incorrect - it's just his/her generalization. We all have them, and they just represent our combined experiences.
Generalizations are only bad if you condemn others based on them - but that's not the fault of the generalization, but rather the fault of the person. Generalizations are how you live life. You get mugged 10 times by the same race/class/location/etc, you might start to generalize against that combination, and you're not wrong, it clearly happened. That's not to say that all of that race/class/location will be the same way. Same goes for animals. If i get bit by a snake 10 times, i might start to fear snakes. Are all snaked bad? No, but my experience with them is bad, so rightfully i have a bit of a stigma and fear towards them.
This culture of fearing assumptions is bewildering to me. Can we just blame the actual actions of people, and not assume that because they generalize that might, at some point, be classist/racist/etc? Can we have some sanity here?
I am sorry if I accidentally hurt your feelings or slighted your national pride. I am simply making an observation based on my general experience with Americans on the web and the sentiment I've noticed. My experience certainly is biased, as people commenting on the Internet do not equally represent whole American nation but I don't feel I need to interview every single one of those 350 millions to make my remark.
This is the most unfortunate part. You think that I've picked some side in this; that I'm defending the concept of being American or the things these people are saying.
I'm saying you're generalizing. This behavior is toxic. Instead of saying, 'You know what, you're right, that's really not a representative sample size and I shouldn't have made the generalization.', you doubled down on making it about generalizations.
But at the end of the day, the only person that behavior hurts is you. So, sorry man.
> This is the most unfortunate part. You think that I've picked some side in this; that I'm defending the concept of being American or the things these people are saying.
You have, though, have you not? You have picked the side of "don't generalize people ever", clearly, no?
I'm on the side of "generalizations and stereotypes are not inherently bad, it's the actions of the person that are bad"
Do you disagree with that?
You call my actions toxic, but what exactly did i do that was toxic? I'm advocating that we judge people by their actions, not their beliefs. What is so wrong with that?
In other words, Don't assume i'm somehow "against" a group of people just because i have assumptions towards them. My dad is heavily religious, i assume and generalize that most religious people don't want me swearing heavily around them - so what! Generalizations aren't bad. Actions are bad. I don't get your view point, clearly.
Your comment did come off as very defensive, at least to me, and presumably to dagenleg as well. I don't think dagenleg is saying that all Americans have this view. (The comment even says it's a stereotype.) I certainly see this thinking all the time in America. It seems that many people's greatest fear is that they will have to subsidize someone else's life in some way. I don't have much direct experience with European culture, but this type of thinking seems less prevalent in Western Europe.
many of the comments here remind me of a children's book I read often with my son, called Henry Hikes to Fitchburg [0].
In the story two bears agree to meet that evening in Fitchburg. Henry decides to spend the day hiking the thirty miles to Fitchburg, and his friend decides to spend the day earning enough money to buy a train ticket to Fitchburg. It's a takeoff on a Thoreau passage, but it's a great way to talk to kids about what we're working for in the end.
The first article you sited actually says that airlines are a low margin business. The fact that they've been more profitable than normal, according to your source, has to do with fuel prices driving more volume and saving some overhead, and their efficiency programs. Even with all that, their gross profits are still just in line with an average corporation.
How is it in the long term? There's historically been a major boom and bust component here, with economic downturns or terror attacks taking a major toll.
I've heard it said that, over its history, commercial aviation as a whole has never made money. However, I haven't seen a good source for that and, with consolidation and lower fuel prices, the airline industry has generally done pretty well over the past decade.
American went bankrupt just five years ago, and they're the world's largest airline. US Airways, Northwest, and Delta all went bankrupt just over a decade ago. A lot of smaller ones have also suffered bankruptcy:
If you look at the profits of existing airlines over the past decade then you're suffering from selection bias. You're also looking at a period soon after a bunch of big airlines were able to unload a lot of debt through bankruptcy. Between 9/11 and 2006, five major US airlines went through Chapter 11, so some of their subsequent success is funded by their former creditors. I don't know if any of that overcomes their recent profits or if the industry has become profitable even accounting for those things. It's certainly possible that they've finally figured out how to consistently make money in the long term.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the overall accounting for airline profitability throughout history was still in the red. In addition to the airlines you called out, there's also Pan Am, Eastern, TWA, etc.--as well as the others in your referenced list.
Furthermore, a lot of international carriers have historically been government subsidized.
It certainly hasn't been a great business for most of its history.
Yeah, I didn't want to go too far back, or it starts being less relevant to the present situation. In any case, it will be interesting to see if the cycle repeats again, or if the current players have finally figured it out.
They actually have margins for a few years now. The price of jet fuel has dropped substantially and that drop hasn't been passed on to customers by the major carriers. The last few years have been record years for them.
This may be true in the short term, but I suspect it affects the long term equilibrium (which of course is a moving target).
If the airline didn't have the option to introduce 'basic economy' prices alongside 'economy' ones, they would either reduce the services offered to economy passengers, or charge a slightly higher price than their competitors.
Air New Zealand does this as well, they also offer Premium Economy and "sky couches" (still in economy but you get a row of three seats that fold flat).
I've heard of someone occasionally getting a good deal but usually you are paying close to full retail for the perks.
I did the minimum bid for me and my family and we got upgraded to business class with AirNZ, my brother had the same experience. It's not even close to retail, it's a nice way of letting you upgrade for cheap if they have the space.
Glad to hear that about KLM. My folks did the same with Aer Lingus and were quite happy with the experience. I don't recall how much they ultimately paid to upgrade but to them it was a good value.
Is "Basic economy" the same for non US airlines? The new lowest/basic fare just means there is no checked baggage included, whereas the regular "economy" has 1 bag included.
Other than that I haven't noticed any difference such as special seating etc.
It seems like this post is choosing a convenient point in time start its argument from. The reason cheap airlines like Spirit came about was because there was a market for cheaper tickets with less amenities. The post says that the major airlines lowered the prices of their lowest tier seats to match these cheap competitors, but this lowest tier had more amenities. Now the major airlines have come up with a new lowest tier of seats (basic economy) and are setting their old lowest tier (economy) back to the higher price that it used to have.
Airlines already operate their jet fleets at or near the optimum fuel-burn-vs-time point; further reducing speed would actually make them less economical due to longer cruise times.
There are occasions when crews will dial-in a higher Cost Index ( CI ), which tells the flight management computer to bias towards higher speed rather than lowest fuel consumption. But in general they are instructed to use specific CIs that reflect the airline's costs.
With the drop in oil prices some airlines have chosen to raise their default CIs, keeping costs the same whilst slightly increasing speed, whereas others have chosen to keep the CI unchanged and to profit from the additional margin.
We have an airline like this in Canada called Porter[0]. They do short flights with ruby props around Eastern/Atlantic Canada as well as the Eastern United States. Usually their tickets are a little bit cheaper however I think their biggest selling feature is that their planes are allowed to land at the Toronto Island airport (which is downtown and a lot closer than the bigger airport) where jet planes are not allowed because they are too noisy.
Some regional airlines use turboprop planes which are basically that speed. They're slower, but cheaper. Thing is they're only suitable for shorter hops.
My instinct is that if perks have gone down but prices have stayed the same, that means that prices would have gone up if we kept the perks.
The airlines are not making huge profits. In fact, they seem to file for bankruptcy constantly. Even though bankruptcy is sometimes a ploy to renegotiate union contracts, they are clearly not making big profits. So if the (overall) higher price is not going to profits, it's going to increased costs of some kind.
Am I the only one surprised by how cheap first class is on ALT-MCO? It's less than 2x the cost of basic economy. I understand it's a short flight, but I turned in some miles for BWI-ALT for my wife and I to upgrade to first, and the sticker price for those tickets were about 2.5x main cabin, which was itself a little more than basic economy.
A few things they've done:
1. They've created baggage fees for checking bags: That accounts for +$50
2. The YQ/Fuel charge: You're subject on their pricing of fuel
3. Seat Charges: If you want to reserve a seat before checking, some airlines charge for this (Namely AA)
4. Fees for printing a BP (Ryan Air), checking in at the airport (Ryan Air again), Carry on luggage (Spirit), etc
5. Charging for alcohol on long haul flights (I'm rather fine with it.. but it used to be customary)
6. Charging for food on long haul flights. (I'm looking at you US Airways CLT-AUR)