[QUOTE=
Hellish? Not compared to life in a refugee camp. But not as pleasant as 25 years ago, either.[/QUOTE]
Very well put mate,
I never looked back at all the changes. I just saw it as code for look out the shit is about to hit the fan.I started in the travel industry in Los Angeles back in 1994. Back then you could still see tickets for sale in the want ads of the local paper. I myself, flew with tickets under other people’s names twice, because it was cheaper or free.
Then our friend Mr. Ted Kaczinski began acting out on his “manifesto” and the airlines started to crack down and your name now had to match the name on the ticket.
Used to cost $25 to use a ticket with a different name, then $50… $100… $150. Now it’s not done. Most Airlines will not allow a name-change at all, and will not refund unless you paid so much for the ticket that you wouldn’t care anyway.
But, over all, I think the lower fares are for the best. I believe opening up the freindly skies to whoever can cough up a couple hundred dollars is great.
People do value the things many are on about in here but saying we can just pay for it overlooks what they are charging for that bit of old class and comfort.
I just did a quick search for United Airlines flights from Chicago to Los Angeles (same dates and times for both…this is just an example):
First Class: $2710
Economy: $508
I have flown with my brother who is an extremely regular flier (he passed 1,000,000 air miles a year or two ago) such that he has upgraded me with his miles to first class on a few occasions and it is wonderful. Truly a treat. However, knowing what is waiting for me in first class versus coach I simply cannot see justifying that cost without being truly wealthy. For all of that I have seen near fights break out among people trying to get into first class (I presume that since they feel they paid and arm and a leg for that seat they deserve that seat and tolerate getting bumped with even less grace than most other passengers).
I would love to see a domestic business class. If I have to pay $500 for a ticket I might be willing to shell out $750 for something between the cattle car and the suites they call seats in first class (not for business trips but for a nice vacation I would). Sadly I have never seen such a thing on offer so I am stuck with cattle car or mortgaging my house for a first class ticket.
Also, I did not even see an option on Travelocity to choose first class seating but admittedly I didn’t look too hard for it.
One last thing…having flown first class on several occasions I would never pay for it on a small(er) jet. First class only really shines on the wide-bodies (two aisles instead of one) it seems.
And it used to be $25 to change the date on your ticket. Now it’s $100, if they let you at all. And if you missed the take-off on your scheduled ticket you could rebook for the fee to a later date, now you just plain lose it.
These, too, were “little things” that survived nearly 20 years after dereg then went away really damn fast.
You’re correct in all respects, of course. By “people” I meant “enough people to support anything close to the current industry capacity.” I should have made that clear and failed to. It ties into what Sam Stone and others have said about the growth of the industry post-deregulation.
If the whole industry decided one day to go back to ‘the old way,’ fares wouldn’t have to increase quite as much as in your example, of course. For one thing, they could (and did) make the seats just as narrow in most coach cabins, they’d just have to provide more legroom. So there would be more seats than if the entire aircraft were configured as all first-class. For another, almost no one actually pays that outrageous fare – it’s mostly upgrades nowadays. But they’d have to increase a lot, and that would drive down discretionary flying. Deregulation has been a huge victory for consumers and some low-cost airlines at the expense of high-cost airlines (and, to be sure, the highly-paid employees of those airlines).
I also lament that the market wasn’t able to support domestic business class. A few airlines tried it, mostly on longer legs, in the early '90s (I think) but there just weren’t enough people like me and thee to justify the loss of seats and businesses hated them – most big businesses required their employees to choose coach on flights under 6 hours. That’s why it caught on for international flights. Maybe we could encourage more press about thrombosis and get businesses to cut the window to three hours? At least out of high-delay airports? 
If they survived for 20 years after deregulation, perhaps deregulation shouldn’t be blamed for their going away now.
I wasn’t saying deregulation was a bad thing. Hell, deregulation is the reason my wife and I were able to take our kids to San Fransisco for a long weekend just because we thought our kids ought to see San Francisco.
But people who refer to flying as “hellish” have a point of comparison that wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme. The fact that the world has changed (i.e., security) doesn’t help things.
And therein it shows that for those with that extra cash, the un-hellish first-class experience is there, just as it has always been. And with smaller charter flights available, you can have a decent first-class experience with a select number of passengers. As part of the brilliance of marketing, the price difference ensures a certain niche market that those in that market want.
Not very different from buying a Mercedes for $120,000 or a Hyundai for $12,000. That is, if you consider downgrading from the MB to the Hyundai “hellish.”
Even first class isn’t what it used to be. I had some upgrades I used from Chicago to San Francisco. The meal was better in coach, but nothing like the nice steak you used to get in Coach on Eastern Airlines. A friend was in first class on the same flight I was on, and he got his peanuts on a tray. (He wasn’t very happy.)
The big difference now is the randomness of the fares. Before you got a reasonable fare without thinking about it. Now you can get a really cheap one, or a really expensive one, same seat, same flight. I flew all the time when I was in grad school (and hardly rich) and I don’t remember thinking it was all that expensive. When I was in college they had student discount cards which made it reach cheap - like $17 from Boston to New York on the shuttle. Beat that, deregulation!
I assure you that I didn’t put on a suit when I flew in the early '70s. Though I will admit that you didn’t see fat hairy, sweaty men in cut off T-shirts or worse on planes then. But you didn’t see them in decent restaurants either.
It’s true that there was no security back then - I smuggled my hamster on a plane in 1970 in a camera case. You can’t do that anymore.
This might be a (pardon the pun) hijack, but since so much consensus seems to be swinging that way: what happened between 1990 and 2000 that made all of the “small comforts” disappear? After I returned to the US in 2000 and started flying domestically again, I was surprised at how much more, well, bus-like the experience was, even before 9/11 and the security restrictions. Was it the intrusion of low-cost airlines into the market (as I think manhattan is implying, if I am not mistaken)? Or was it just price war, and a resulting necessary cutback on frills, amongst the big players?
Interestingly enough, back around 1960, what we now call First Class was called “regular service”, and was supposedly roughly equivalent in cost to first-class rail fare plus sleeping accommodation. Now, of course, what people think of as “regular” air passenger service is cattle-car accommodations. Truly flying has ceased to be the rarified, luxurious experience it once was, but the democritization of air travel is definitely a good thing.
On a side note, I haven’t flown in about 6 years but will be making a trip between L.A. and the East Coast next year. I have no idea what to expect these days. What exactly is the food situation nowadays? Do they still serve you a meal when you fly from coast to coast? Should I avoid booking anything other than a nonstop, due to the fact that if my journey comprises two or more short hops, I won’t get a meal on any of them? Am I starting to sound like a hobbit? Yeah, I think so.
Sua
Probably a bit of both. Say airline X sees that low cost airline Y is thriving with no food. They’ll cut back on their food, and if their market share doesn’t go down, everyone will copy, since the money saved goes right to the bottom line. It wasn’t long ago that one airline (Continental?) experimented with selling meals. When there wasn’t a major consumer backlash, almost everyone did it.
That is what the race to the bottom is all about. Someone tests the water about making things worse, and if they don’t get burned it’s standard. If someone started an airline with a few more frills, and it caught on, you’d see the food coming back.
Last October I flew nonstop from San Francisco to Charlotte NC on a USAir/United plane - and got no food worth mentioning. (Soda and pretzels only.) I made myself two bagels for the morning flight, and had a big meal just before getting on for the return.
American used to give brown bags on long enough flights, but they may have cut that out. I haven’t flown them for a while.
You can buy some food on the plane, but it wasn’t very appealing and was expensive.
On the upside, you can now see the movie free if you bring a headset, and if you buy one you get to keep it. I guess so few people bought the movie that it was no longer worth the overhead to collect money.
That’s kind of what I thought. Thanks.
Another thought came to mind–I wonder how much the Internet, and “instant” fare comparison, came into play as well. Back in 1990 if you wanted to comparison shop you usually booked a flight through a travel agent, who would either call up the relevant flights on FlightDisk or something like that or consult a book. Either way, though the prices weren’t set in stone, they didn’t fluctuate from day to day either. There just wasn’t as intense a competition in flight pricing.
I figure that back then price wasn’t the be-all and end-all of whether you booked a flight. Back in 1990 if my dad was travelling on business, he’d take a flight that was most convenient to him, even if it cost his company $50 or $100 more or so. Now, though, how many of us take a 6 am or red-eye flight just because we got it on Travelocity or Expedia for a few dollars less? It seems to me that once we could see all the flight prices (but not all the flight services!) at once, price and not service became the determinant factor on choice of flight and choice of airlines. Service was bound to suffer.
That varies from airline to airline. In the last year some my flights in American featured that brown-bag “bistro” service. Continental DOES serve food on longer flights that include what they consider "mealtimes* and does not charge for it (at least not as late as September 04). But depending on route CAN be the earlier-mentioned Qwickeemart calzone. UselessAir stiffs you altogether whenever they can (if you went to Charlotte it was a USAirways plane, even if on a UAL code) but when I did get fed they were pretty OK about my special request (low Na+) meal.
Haven’t flown Delta since 1998 or NW ever so dunno how they are doing, foodwise.
Spectre, you should look up the meal availability while looking up the flights available, it should be accessible under “flight details” for whoever’s on the computer. But yes, multiple short hops likely = no inflight meal, hit the food court at the connecting airports.
Duke, other factors in this are:
(a) that at the same time as the public increased its demand for whatever’s-lowest-fare, the “legacy carriers” ( i.e. the survivors of the original deregulation) were carrying on with long-term “legacy” union contracts, pension plans, executive-compensation packages, long-term airport gate leases, etc., dating back to the end of the Good Old Days. So the cost of competitiveness – in a world where the customer doesn’t care about anything but getting to LA for $88.95 instead of $89.99 – had to be taken out in a “race to the bottom” from customer-convenience items, those not being tied in to any contract.
(b) that at some point in the 1990s, even businesses started making it policy to seek the cheapest fare. That was a HUGE hit.
It is true that all the indignities are not a direct effect of deregulation, but deregulation did create the environment where they are more evident, even if it is an honest response to the “LA for $89 or I drive” crowd.
Crucial extra element to the fares subject - computers. The whole online-booking stuff is only really an extension of what travel agents were suddenly able to do a few decades ago, which was to search for many fares while a customer was sat in front of them. The airlines were now free to modify fares according to demand, etc etc.
I flew from here to NYC on American a few months ago, via Dallas (yep, I went west to go east…I HATE DFW, but that’s another post) and my flight out from Dallas was listed as having “lunch.” I don’t eat on planes, really, because I get a bit queasy sometimes flying, but I was curious as to what that meant, because the last time I was on a lunch flight it meant something resembling an actual meal.
Lunch turned out to be a grab-a-bag-with-a-sandwich as you got on the plane deal. I didn’t bother. One of the flight attendants told me that “soon” they were going to start charging for them. I am just old enough to remember eating a few airline meals with actual silverware, and they even had a choice of a couple of main dishes. I haven’t seen anything like an actual meal on a plane in years, even on long-haul domestic flights.
I’d rather feed myself anyway, but that’s not the point.
All I can say is that I’m glad I had the chance to fly with CrossAir while they were still a separate company (ie before the collapse of SwissAir): three-course meal, really good stuff, china & polished silver throughout, champagne & all drinks on demand. And this was for the four of us plebs, on ultra-student-discount tickets at the back of the plane. No wonder they were found to be ‘no longer viable’ after 9/11. (I did have fun when they asked what paper we wanted, and asked for the Independent 
)