The great American vacation is vanishing. Every year, the average length of a leisure trip shrinks by a few more hours, to the point that travelers like Craig Puller have a hard time thinking of it as a vacation at all. Consider the trip Puller took to the Florida Keys. Reluctant to take a lot of time off from his job, the Princeton, N.J., data analyst flew to Miami over a long weekend and spent three nights in three different hotels before jetting back just in time for work Monday morning.
Commentary
Given the airline industry’s dismal state, passengers have accepted recent cuts in amenities, services and meals without much complaining. But when American Airlines announced it would scrap its roomier economy-class seats on nearly a quarter of its flights, Ed Kummel snapped. “What’s next?” asked the network engineer from Ashburn, Va. “Standing-room only with flight attendants holding cattle prods?” The latest round of reductions suggests the big airlines are operating under a flawed assumption. Passengers, they seem to believe, want one thing: low fares. American says it’s returning to what it euphemistically calls “standard” seating because passengers said they’re more interested in low prices than roomier seats. Or, put differently, customers actually asked for the change.
Just as the busy summer travel season took off earlier this month, American Airlines announced it would scrap its roomier economy-class seats on nearly a quarter of its flights serving leisure and vacation markets. Midwest Airlines also said it would rip out its spacious seats on its new “saver” service and replace them with narrower ones. Both airlines are playing catch-up with the competition, which seems intent on squeezing the most passengers into the least amount of space.
It took a car rental agent almost an hour to process Chelsea Grogan’s paperwork for a one-way rental between Orlando and New York. Then the employee couldn’t find her vehicle in the airport parking lot. And when the Forest Hills, N.Y., graduate student dropped off the Dodge Intrepid, she discovered a surprise $350 surcharge on her bill. “The customer service department wouldn’t return my calls to straighten things out,” she said.
Picture yourself reclining on a secluded tropical beach, a palm tree gently swaying above you. It’s a tranquil and welcome image at a time when war worries and threats of severe respiratory infection are making travel anything but pleasurable, isn’t it? Thank goodness for the latest issue of Travel+Leisure magazine, which doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. A special 18-page Caribbean advertising section offers no less than three separate ads featuring photos of a lone coconut palm arching over turquoise water.
Holland America’s Caribbean cruises are billed as voyages to paradise filled with “sun, serenity, good times and romance.” But for hundreds of passengers who sailed on the company’s Amsterdam last fall, their vacations didn’t live up to that promise. Instead, they were infected by the Norwalk virus, an increasingly common gastrointestinal ailment that confined many of them to their cabins with diarrhea, vomiting spells and a fever. Although the travelers recovered, the memories of a cruise ruined by sickness lingered.
A few days ago, I got a letter from US Airways’ frequent flier program offering magazine subscriptions for my miles. In the past, I would have preferred to hold on to my hard-earned points for an award ticket. Not now. This year, with US Airways and United in bankruptcy and other airlines struggling, I cashed in as many of my points as possible for subscriptions to Time, Entertainment Weekly and Smithsonian (titles I wouldn’t necessarily pay full price for but don’t mind having around).
What if the pilot on your next flight suddenly decided to stop following directions from the control tower? You wouldn’t feel safe, would you? But wait – isn’t that what three airlines did last week, so to speak? In announcing that they would defy the Transportation Department’s restrictions on a new alliance between Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, the threesome have essentially told the metaphorical control tower to stick it.
Whenever business takes him overseas, Seung Oh prefers to fly on carriers such as Korean Air or Singapore Airlines. “The service is much better than you find on an American airline,” says Oh, the vice president for a technology investment company in Fairfield, Conn. “Too bad they don’t fly domestic routes.” Well, why not? The short answer: The government won’t let them.
You can leave your hat on at the airport. But as Phil Doherty discovered, you should also expect a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent to pull you aside when you do. “It happens without fail whenever I wear my straw hat,” says the contract engineer from Mechanicsville, N.Y. “When the hat’s on, they give me the once-over. When it’s not, they leave me alone.” Since its creation last year, the TSA has refused to answer specific questions about its screening criteria, arguing that if it told the traveling public what made someone look suspicious, it would tip off the terrorists. Fair enough.
Are airline flight attendants too fat? Possibly. Passengers, crewmembers and several studies suggest that these airline employees have been packing on the pounds lately. Not that it’s any of our business. How much someone else weighs is a private matter – unless their mass affects the safety of our next trip. And then it does, indeed, become an issue. We already know that flight attendants are prone to eating disorders.
What’s the difference between a registered voter and a parrot? In Key Largo, not much. We’ve been foiled by the talking birds a few times during the campaign. We knock on someone’s front door – candidate Kari Haugeto, our five-month-old son, Aren, and me – and the bird answers through an open window, “Hello?” Kari then steps up to the mosquito screen, unable to see through the heavy storm shutter, and says, “Hi. My name is Kari and I’m running for the Key Largo Wastewater Board. I’m…”
The books just closed on another miserable quarter for the airline industry. American Airlines led the flock with a loss of $924 million, followed by United Airlines, which is $889 million in the red. Delta Air Lines hemorrhaged $326 million, while Northwest Airlines and Continental Airlines bled $46 million and $37 million, respectively. The only standout? No-frills Southwest Airlines, which posted a profit of $74.9 million. “Why can’t the other airlines take a hint from Southwest?” wonders Wanda Spataro, a Monterey, Calif., consultant and frequent traveler.
Criticizing the airline industry is almost second nature to us. We repeat disparaging comments like a tired mantra today. Bad service! Onerous ticket restrictions! Undeserving of government subsidies! Southwest Airlines, the no-frills carrier that has defied the industry’s sad decline, is most often mentioned as the only exception among major airlines. Passengers rave about its low fares, on-time performance and irreverent attitude, and rightfully so.
The airline industry’s current malaise is no laughing matter. Or is it? Yeah, things are bad. The nation’s carriers could lose more than $8 billion this year. They’re hitting up Congress for billions in aid, and they’re cutting flights and adding onerous new fees to their tickets. At a time like this, the whole industry should feel dejected. So what’s with all the jokes?
Don’t ask frequent traveler Andrew deLivron to notice the silver lining around the once-friendly skies that now hang ominously above business travelers. His disillusionment with the travel industry – and especially the airlines – erupted in raw anger recently when the major carriers, led by a bankrupt US Airways, added new restrictions to their tickets and mileage awards. “What the airlines are doing just doesn’t make sense,” said the product manager for a truck parts manufacturer in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Upset by new fees and higher fares, he’s lost confidence in the travel industry. Have the airlines, hotels, car rental companies serving business travelers bothered to noticed the votes of no confidence from people such as deLivron?
The nation’s air carriers sure have a strange way of trying to win our business back. With their earnings in a freefall – together, they lost an astounding $3.8 billion in the first half of this year – and customer ratings at a historic low, the ailing airlines recently decided to make flying even more unpleasant. They cut schedules, reduced mileage benefits, imposed new ticketing fees and added onerous restrictions to non-refundable tickets – measures they say will save them money, but which have angered many passengers to the point that they never want to darken the door of an airport again.
Did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 kill business travel? Conventional wisdom suggests that the attacks inflicted massive damage on corporate travel, grounding frequent fliers such as Brooks Hurd. “If you fly on short business trips, your travel time is sometimes doubled by security checks,” says Hurd, a consultant for the San Luis Obispo, Calif., semiconductor industry. “Why bother?”
Now that US Airways is bankrupt and United Airlines is following its vapor trail into the abyss of insolvency, here’s a question worth asking: What happened to all that money we gave the ailing airline industry after Sept. 11? Congress allocated $15 billion to save the carriers after the terrorist attacks, of which $5 billion were outright grants. Of that, US Airways pocketed $287 million and United took $724 million. Are these airlines going down and taking our tax dollars with them?
Kill first class
August 11, 2003
Flying first class isn’t what it used to be, to hear travelers like Gary Arbonies talk about it. “First class is what coach class was like a decade ago,” complained the San Diego furniture consultant. It isn’t just the meager meals, which he says resemble those once served in steerage. Legroom and service have slipped, too, as the airlines’ fortunes took a nose dive.
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