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Will Road Warriors Return?
Opinion · September 13, 2002

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?

Well, yes.

Hurt by a soft economy, hammered by bankruptcies and hassled by their most loyal customers, the travel industry is making a quiet effort to come clean with us. The efforts range from telling the truth about rates to clarifying the meaning of words such as 'non-refundable" and "convenience."

The changes aren't meant to endear all of us to the industry; just the big-spending business travelers on which these companies are pinning their recovery hopes. Consider US Airways' decision to make its non-refundable tickets non-refundable.

Last month, the airline shocked passengers and its competitors - who eventually matched the move - when it announced that it its discounted advance-purchase tickets will have no value once a flight has departed. Finally, a carrier is saying that its non-refundable tickets are just that. Before a passenger could show up late for a flight and catch the next plane by flying standby. If your plans changed, you could also get credit toward a future flight, often without paying a change fee. Not anymore.

It isn't just the airlines that are being more upfront with their customers. Car rental companies have discovered that telling the truth about their rates makes sense. A few years ago, the prices quoted by car rental companies over their reservations phone numbers and through their Web sites didn't include taxes and other surcharges, according to Jon LeSage, a researcher for Abrams Travel Data in Long Beach, Calif. But recent customer pressure has turned that trend around. "Disclosure has improved considerably," he says. "Companies are doing a much better job of estimating the actual cost of your rental, which can be 20 or even 30% higher."

Sometimes the changes are small and semantic. Brian Talbot, a postal clerk in Shelton, Conn., remembers booking a room at the Wyndham Casa Marina in Key West, Fla., for a one-night stay recently. When he checked out, he noticed a "convenience charge" of $11 a day to cover the cost of ice, beach towel service, beach chair use, a mini-refrigerator and daily room cleaning. "I was paying an exorbitant rack rate and the excess charge was unjustifiable," he said. The Wyndham recently revamped the charge, lowering it by $1 and renaming it a more appropriate "resort fee." Guests still protest the surcharge, but at least the property isn't offending its customers' intelligence by suggesting that the fee has anything to do with their convenience.

Travel companies aren't being more upfront out of the kindness of their hearts, says travel expert Anita Potter. Rather, they are calculated moves that are meant to endear them to the customers that yield them the highest revenues. "As travel companies struggle with how to make money, they may end up being more truthful with their customers, especially business travelers, than they ever thought they would be," said the editor of the website AnitaVacation.com.

Will this honest approach work at attracting more business travelers? It's been tried in travel before, but for different reasons. In 1999, under the threat of government reregulation, the nation's airline industry adopted a voluntary plan called "Customers First" which, among other things, promised that carriers would be more straightforward about disclosing low fares. But it wasn't done with a financial motive - the airline business was flying high at the time.

In other industries, such as apparel and defense, efforts to restore customer confidence in a time of financial distress have yielded better earnings. A good example is footwear company, Nike, which instituted some of the strictest disclosure rules about its manufacturing process after it was criticized for using vendors which allegedly ran sweatshops. The bad publicity was hurting its image and business. After it came clean, its revenues climbed. The honesty-is-the-best-policy approach probably helped out.

But the travel business still has a way to go - a long way - before it can reap the dividends of this new honesty. Road warriors continue to gripe that airlines are less than forthcoming about delays, for example. LeSage of Abrams Travel Data is quick to point out that some car rental companies still fail to disclose all fees, and many don't make allowances for fuel options or insurance in the rate quoted to travelers. Hotels may have improved their disclosure of surcharges, but many properties continue to hide the notification of these additional fees in small print that no guest can be reasonably expected to read.

Is the travel industry's newfound frankness just a byproduct of hard times, an experiment in honesty that will end once the economy rebounds? Or is the change permanent? It may not matter. DeLivron, for his part, is switching to no-frills Southwest Airlines and plans to stay in less pricey hotels because they don't nickel-and-dime him the way full-service properties do. That way, if he gets lied to, at least he won't be spending a lot, too.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.