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"Crowded Buses from Hell"

By Patrick Totty

Sheri Leigh, the former travel agent who created this web site four years ago, has trekked by camel in North Africa, faced down gantlets of wolf-whistling men in Rome and stoically eaten food of dubious origin that would have triple-flipped the stomach of any lesser traveler.

With creds like that, you have to listen up when she says modern airliners are “crowded buses from Hell.”

“The fact is, they are buses, and nobody should be surprised by that fact,” she says. “Everybody wanted cheap air travel and airlines, and they got them. But for airlines to deliver cheap seats, they had to slash and cut every amenity.”

Knee room? It sliced into profits, so it had to go. Decent food? Also a threat to profits, so it had to go, too. Courteous treatment? Who expects ticket takers and crowd controllers to be civil?

Not that the traveling public was innocent in all this. Once air travel became so affordable that virtually anybody could use it, the downward spiral in passenger behavior was inevitable. As hard as it might be for younger travelers to believe, wife beater shirts and flip-flops were rare at one time on planes, and children who kicked the seats of the passengers in front of them were actually stopped – or else – by attentive parents or proactive flight attendants. 

In many ways, what has happened to air travel is the same thing that happened to motor travel: A new form of transportation, initially available only to the wealthy, becomes so cheap that almost everybody can afford it. Previously uncrowded highways and streets become clogged and inconvenient as more and more vehicles take to them. Public transportation, aimed at the lowest common denominator, becomes widespread and inexpensive, but it also becomes something people grit their teeth through.

“There’s no first-class section on a bus,” says Leigh, “and people who think they’re traveling ‘first class’ on a bus company like United or American are only fooling themselves. A somewhat wider seat and marginally better service just don’t justify the big extra charge.”

Is there a way out of the spiral? Leigh returns to her public transportation analogy: “When you get tired of a bus, you upgrade to a taxi or a town car. You pay more money in order to substantially increase your chances of arriving on time and unhassled.” Which means, she says, that arrival of specialty air carriers is imminent. Among the services she thinks people will be enjoying within the next two years:

First Class-Only Carriers – The market for upscale air travel never went away, it just wasn’t all that well served. Taking the SST cost a minor fortune and the SST fleet, now retired, never could handle but a fraction of the luxury market. Other airlines have very good first class service, but those carriers are almost all state-subsidized national airlines. If forced to compete, their first-class service would rapidly deteriorate to U.S. levels.

In the U.S. domestic market, airlines dedicated solely to first class and business class travelers are the next step. Because they won’t need to exploit the business travelers in order to subsidize an economy market they have interest in serving, they’ll be able to compete with current carriers on price. With entire planes filled with passengers who are paying – willingly – far more than a planeload of economy class travelers, their profit margins will be high.

Air Taxis – Small, nimble, durable, relatively inexpensive small jets are on the horizon. These planes will be able to load up five or six passengers at small airports and fly thousand-mile routes with far less hassle and delay than even the most efficient big airline. If this doesn’t deliver a death blow to the airline’s much-hated hub-and-spoke system, it will at least be one big kick in the shins.

Bulk buyers creating custom flights – As soon as airlines drop the pretense that they are anything more than very bad public transportation, the way will be opened for middlemen to improve the quality of air travel. Think of when municipal bus systems rent out their vehicles to private groups: To make money, they have to deliver a decent level of service and cleanliness. Otherwise the business goes elsewhere.

 

If entities with the ability to buy huge batches of air travel enter the picture, they’ll be able to force the airlines to ramp up their service levels. Airlines that respond well will be rewarded with increasing business. Those that continue their low levels of service will soon be winning Darwin Awards for Most Likely to Go extinct.

 

Study Confirms Our Bias Toward “Cultural Travelers”

We’ve got company we’re very proud of: Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) and Smithsonian Magazine say that 81 percent of U.S. adults who traveled in the past year – 118 million people – consider themselves “historic/cultural travelers.” They are defined as travelers who include an historical or cultural activity on their trips.

That’s a lot of people. And also a lot of money: "The sheer volume of travelers interested in arts and history, as well as their spending habits, their travel patterns and demographics, leaves no doubt that history and culture continue to be a significant and growing part of the U.S. travel experience. This is a market to which the travel industry needs to pay close attention in the future," said William S. Norman, president & CEO of TIA.