Llewellyn King: U.S. airlines gouge and pack

WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A Conservative British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, coined the phrase “the unacceptable face of capitalism” in 1973. He was describing the actions of Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland and the company he headed, Lonrho (London Rhodesia), a mining and real-estate conglomerate with interests across Africa.

Having had a hectic travel schedule since the end of the COVID-19 lockdown, I can say that the airlines have become an unacceptable face of capitalism.

I refer to the airlines collectively because from the traveling public’s point of view, they are a massive whole with little to choose between them. Nominally in competition, their attitude to the public has become a common one of disrespect.

That one of the airlines, Southwest, would implode when stressed was no surprise. A metamorphosis had taken place in the last two years with the passengers -- the customers – becoming, in the collective airline psyche, just economic opportunities, ripe for endless upselling.

When the airlines realized that they could extract money over and above the ticket price, they began a service free fall and abandoned any pretense of respect for their customers -- or, apparently, themselves. They, the customers, had become economic targets for exploitation.

First came the baggage charges. Surely, the airlines knew people didn’t travel without bags and could have allowed for that in ticket pricing.

Then they found they could upsell the seating, making passengers pay extra for marginally better seats, and even for boarding about five minutes early.

On a recent flight in a Boeing 767, the airline was charging a stiff premium to sit in the double seats near the window rather than in the three abreast in the middle. My wife and I stayed in the middle.

A new class of service called “basic economy” has prohibited carry-ons in the overhead bins, forcing passengers to pay for checked baggage and wiping out some of their flight-cost savings.

I have flown round the globe for decades and have known every class of service, from that on the Concorde to the wonders of first class on Asian air carriers. But mostly, I have sat in the back and watched as the aircraft have gotten older and shabbier, as the seating area has shrunken, as the lavatories have shrunken in number and size, as the snacks and food offering are as incomprehensible as they are inedible, and as the flexibility of tickets has disappeared.

In tandem with these deteriorations in comfort, service and pricing, has come cancellation of normal business practices when it comes to cash and credit cards. You can no longer buy a ticket with cash at the airport. You can’t use a credit card on board for a snack if you haven’t pre-registered your credit card and, in many cases, you must have your own device to watch entertainment.

For a fee, of course, you can now get Wi-Fi on many airlines. But the seats are so positioned that you can’t, in my experience, open a laptop and work. For another fee, they may have a fix.

As I have strapped myself into a sometimes-broken seat (which reclines about 2 inches), looking at the ashtray (which indicates the age of the cabin furnishings), I have begun to wonder to what extent this predatory approach to passengers, this total indifference to those who pay the stiff fares and all the fees on top, has filtered down to the maintenance department.

Passengers, I guess, are inured to the horrors of airline travel and the victimhood that goes with it. Know this: If you are trying to travel by air, you have identified yourself as an economic target for a group of companies, the airlines, which supposedly compete but which, within hours, match every new fee dreamed up by one of their supposed competitors.

The latest serious inequity is defrauding passengers by reducing the value of their frequent-flyer miles.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg needs to take a root-and-branch look at the airlines: the greed, the collusion and the manifest disrespect for the passengers that is pervasive. Importantly, he needs to look at seat size and aisle width and their impact on safety.

I have a full flying schedule ahead in January, and I am preparing for my time in the gouging skies with trepidation and resignation. 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King: Lament of the airline coach passenger

The vice president for mollifying irate customers of one of the great airlines — there are only four left, and by the time you read this it may be down to three — has written me asking how I “enjoyed” my last flight. I wonder if this jokester even knows what that word enjoy means? Do they have access to dictionaries at Big Air? I couldn’t even get a second cup of coffee from a surly flight attendant, who only wanted to sit in the back of the plane and kvetch about the latest merger.

Definitely, asking you about the quality of your flight is in dubious taste: Have any Big Air executives ever walked back to coach, where we sit like rowers without oars in a trireme.

My missive from Big Air asks questions like, “How did you enjoy your reception at the check-in?” It said I should evaluate my level of experience from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.”

How can you relate in those terms to a machine called a “kiosk”? As it so happens, my kiosk had serious socialization problems. It’s the seventh kiosk from the left at Washington Dulles International Airport, and it’s determined to prove its recalcitrance from the get-go. It rejected my credit card; it didn’t know my frequent flier number; it told me I wasn’t flying anywhere, as I didn’t exist because it couldn’t “get my record.”

It became quite civil, though, when trying to sell me a larger seat, take a fee for my baggage, and offering to sell me more frequent flier miles. What for? Does Kiosk No. 7 know they have 304 blackout days a year?

Having secured my ticket, I moved on to security — where some TSA worker any day now may be nabbed by a casting director for the archetypal role of a terrorist – which took a grim view of me. I stood bereft of shoes, belt, wallet and all identification so that I could put my hands in the air in a glass contraption. Another incipient movie bad guy examined the screen. Not good enough. I got wanded. Of course, if someone had made off with my plastic tray of possessions while this is going on, I’d have become stateless: undocumented, illegal.

Then I found that I was in Zone 4 for boarding. I’m always in Zone 4, no matter when I book my flight. I suppose I was pre-selected for Zone 4 on account of some library book I never returned. This means there wouldn’t be any room for my suitcase in the overhead compartment, and it’d be taken from me as though I’d been apprehended doing something I shouldn’t.

At least I’ve been saved sitting in a seat too small for its designed purpose for 20 minutes more than necessary. The seat that was too small for me, too small for smaller people, and very much too small for the enormous man who sat next to me.

Did you know they’ve got new seats now without a place to put your book or magazine? They have slim backs to reduce comfort and so more seats can be jammed in.

Then there was the toilet. You must use the one at the back because the people in first class – actually they’re not people, they’re corporate lawyers, a subset of homo sapiens — cannot be expected to share their spacious commode with the likes of coach travelers, who have a social disease: less money.

Here’s a tip you’ll appreciate if you’re a man: Decide which bodily function you plan to execute because there’s no room to turn around. No. 1, walk straight in; No. 2, back in. Women always have to back in.

The pilot came on. He sounded as though his last job was playing a trail boss on radio. You know, that special kind of speech that Easterners think Westerners actually speak: all about “critters” and “dudes,” and how we’re going to “canter over to LA.” 

It was going to be five bleak hours of discomfort.

But the good news is passengers won’t have to endure seats much longer. Coming to an airline near you: standing room only and meat hooks for safety belts. 

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is a longtime publisher, columnist and international business consultant.

Robert Whitcomb: High anxiety; keeping up with the swells

  We’re all hearing more and more complaints about bad airline service. But then, flying has been miserable for years, except for some of the relatively few folks who can afford business or first class.

Back in the late ‘70s, as Americans started to fly much more, there was a push to deregulate airlines. The idea was that this would encourage more competition that would, in turn, lower prices. And indeed prices fell for a while.

But deregulation also reduced service quality – except for safety. In fact, as unpleasant as these airborne cattle cars have become, flying has until recently been safer than ever, because of technology and heightened security. Now, however, tighter seating might cause a pulmonary-embolism epidemic.

Deregulation also slashed service to smaller cities and, as airlines created giant new hub systems, it got a lot harder to get direct flights to and from mid-size cities. That’s especially where, as at such airports as  Rhode Island's T.F. Green, politicians delayed lengthening runways to please some loud locals.

Meanwhile, the World Wide Web let airlines dump a lot more work on their passengers, who now must deal with an extreme complexity of flight options on their computers. Schedules and pricing, like taxes and much else in America, have become far too complicated. (Read “The Paradox of Choice,’’ by Barry Schwartz.)

When it comes to flying, most Americans are willing sheep as long as they think they can find a cheap flight. But whatever the original aim of deregulation to boost competition, we’re down to four airlines – American, Delta, Southwest and United – controlling 85 percent of domestic flights and in a better position than ever to gouge us, through higher ticket prices and fat new baggage and other fees. The old regulated, orderly and predictable airline system is looking better and better.

The happy valley of “choice’’ via late ’70s deregulation has paradoxically led to fewer choices and much less enjoyable travel. And a lot of us miss such quaint carriers as Mohawk Airlines that could take us to, say, about a dozen cities in upstate New York

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My colleague Froma Harrop has written eloquently about the case in which Manhattanite Thomas Gilbert Jr. allegedly shot to death his father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., after the latter had reportedly tried to cut his subsidy of his troubled son. See: http://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/commentary/20150118-froma-harrop-the-rich-indeed-are-different--and-more-messed-up.ece

What struck me was the pressure that the older Mr. Gilbert apparently felt to keep up with the Joneses of New York’s mercantile aristocracy. Not only was the estate that he reportedly left ($1.6 million) astonishingly paltry for someone in his crowd, with his Beekman Place and East Hampton residences, but he was working seven-day weeks at age 70 to pump up a tiny ($7 million) hedge fund.

And why is it that so many of these people see Wall Street as the only socially acceptable way to make money? Indeed, Thomas Jr. wanted to start a hedge fund himself (even as the giant fees asked by them are increasingly turning off investors). It seems somehow connected with his sense of entitlement.

Then there’s New York House Speaker Sheldon Silver, who’s accused of raking in millions of dollars in illegal referral income for a law firm from rich oncologist Robert Taub in return for Speaker Silver sending state money to Dr. Taub’s cancer center.

The New York Times reported that the exasperated Dr. Taub got Speaker Silver to get his son Jonathan a job because he (according to acquaintances) allegedly was more interested in “playing bass guitar and blogging his right-leaning political views than in finding a permanent job.’’

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The sort of outcome of last Sunday’s Greek elections, in which a leftist, anti-austerity party won, probably couldn’t happen in the U.S. because most poor people don’t bother voting here.

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Winter in the Northeast’s cities may have its attractions (fresher than in the warm weather) but the nearby ocean means that the wind, funneling between the high-rises, often makes us feel colder than we do in Vermont and New Hampshire. There, the dry cold, bright skies and mountains can be exhilarating.

The heart, to me, of this winter joy are Appalachian Mountain Club lodges, with their big fireplaces and smart and friendly people. They give winter a good name that’s hard to find on the dreary streets of Boston, Providence and New York.

Robert Whitcomb  (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees New England Diary.