Attention All Passengers, page 3
Anolik clearly has done okay by leading such fights as one of the nation’s most knowledgeable travel attorneys. His beautiful home offers a spectacular panorama of San Francisco Bay that encompasses both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, a view shared by neighbors Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. I asked him if I am wrong in concluding the major airlines have gone out of their way to confuse customers by intentionally muddying their contracts of carriage, those vital documents that spell out exactly what passengers can expect. Anolik laughed and said, “The contracts of carriage definitely have been tightened up. Very little in the contracts gives you a right, but they will mention the rights they’re taking away.” He added, “Every time the airlines get hit with a lawsuit they fill in a loophole. If there is a new cockamamie charge and it is not on the contract of carriage, they put it in.” What’s more, Anolik noted that these exemption lists keep growing, even though the DOT ordered a moratorium on such exemptions. His blunt assessment: “It’s fraud.”
These contracts spell out what an airline will do if you are bumped, or your flight is delayed or canceled. And what we found after studying the issue at Consumer Reports is that over the last decade these documents have become murkier, as plain English has been replaced with legalese. And a term such as “the airline shall” has been supplanted by “the airline may” instead.
In theory, U.S. airlines are supposed to prominently post these contracts on their websites, but good luck in finding most of them in less than five page clicks. (A notable exception is JetBlue, which has provided the most customer service transparency in the industry since its Valentine’s Day weekend operational meltdown in 2007, when 1,100 flights were canceled.) I have personally found that airline call center employees and even airport personnel usually have no idea what these contracts are, let alone what they dictate.
Not that clear explanations will help. “It’s really a unilateral contract, not a bilateral contract,” says passenger advocate Kate Hanni. And sometimes the legalese can be just plain misleading. In July 2010 a Southwest Airlines executive corrected a “misinterpretation” over the term “mechanical difficulties” being included in its (long) list of force majeure (“act of God”) flight delay conditions; he explained the “added verbiage” referred only to mechanical difficulties outside the airline’s control, such as a broken airport deicing system, and not aircraft problems. The incident underscored just how confusing such “added verbiage” can be for passengers.
Then again, many of these “employees” are not employees at all, a topic I discussed with Anolik. And he clearly relishes torturing the industry: “When I’m early for a flight I’ll ask, ‘Can I see your denied-boarding policy?’ And the person working will have no idea. You’re right, they don’t know the rules anymore.”
Airline industry old-timers—both employees and passengers—still invoke the days of the Rule 240 clause, a holdover from the regulated era in which the government spelled out specifically how airlines were required to meet their passengers’ needs. It was clear and concise for all passengers and uniformly fair for all carriers, but Anolik said Rule 240 is no longer mandatory in the deregulated era.
However, I believe it’s time to write a new Rule 240, for the twenty-first century. That’s why when I became a member of the FAAC I urged the DOT to adopt procedures similar to those employed by the European Union. The EU’s rules are clear, cogent, and easy for every passenger to understand, particularly if they download a color-coded chart that indicates uniform compensation for airline mistreatment. This isn’t to suggest that the European model should be copied outright, but it certainly provides a decent blueprint for us. As travel ombudsman Linda Burbank notes, “They have better transparency in Europe. In America it’s about flying Darwin Air.”
As a last recourse, passengers can still file a formal complaint against a domestic airline with the DOT. Though many consumers undoubtedly respond with a “What’s the point?” attitude about such a pro forma task, Anolik noted that it’s really quite important: “Unless they hear from passengers, the DOT will say, ‘We don’t have any complaints on file.’ ”
Loads of Fun? Airlines Emulate Troop Carriers
One mechanic for a legacy carrier—so-called because these large airlines predated deregulation—summed it up: “If you’re flying full planes and you can’t make money, you shouldn’t run an airline.” And yet that’s exactly what we have. My own theory is that the airline industry’s decision to fill all these planes has had a direct effect on making flying more miserable: more boarding delays, more mishandled bags, more consumer complaints, more air rage.
During World War II, when commercial airlines were pressed into service as de facto military transports, planes were fuller than at any time before or since, with average passenger load factors—the percentage of occupied seats—reaching nearly 90 percent. After 1946, it took the U.S. airline industry more than fifty years to crack the 70 percent mark again. By 2009, load factors reached 80 percent, and by 2010 the domestic industry’s average topped out at 82.1 percent. With an average that high, the percentage of flights at or near 100 percent full obviously has increased as well. But this is not what airline executives ever envisioned.
Analyst Bob Harrell explains: “With airlines, everybody’s in that game to get the last twenty passengers in the bucket. But it creates a terrible service problem. Transportation systems are designed for 65 percent to 70 percent capacity and they can’t handle it when it’s twenty points higher. Which you’ll see if you’re in the middle seat of a 757 waiting to get served.”
Consider it this way. Delta operates Boeing 737-800s configured in economy class with three seats on either side of the aisle for a total of 144 seats, or 6 in each of the 24 rows. Putting aside those passengers who are traveling together, leaving all 48 middle seats empty in this 3x3 configuration would require a 67 percent load factor. An 80 percent load factor means only 29 middle seats will remain unoccupied; a 90 percent factor leaves only 14 empty middles. Further, consider that every middle seat taken causes discomfort for not one but three people. Obviously that’s a lot of crowded passengers, a lot of overstuffed overhead bins, a lot of squeezing and jostling in the aisles, a lot of waiting for that lavatory.
There’s a technical term economists employ to describe this condition: it’s called greed. Over the last few years the same airline executives who have levied fees for checking bags and calling reservations, who have outsourced flying to low-cost regional airlines and maintenance to Third World sweat shops, have decided that the airline business most closely resembles the sardine canning industry.
What’s more, industry experts note that not only are all those full planes not good for passengers, they’re not even good for the airlines themselves. That’s because once an airline’s loads hit the 70 percent mark, that carrier starts “feeding its competitors” because it can’t handle the spillover. In addition, higher loads create additional operating expenses.
“It’s awful,” said Rolfe Shellenberger, an industry legend who began his thirty-one-year career for American Airlines as a reservations agent in 1951. “They’re cattle cars now.” I shared with him my contention that packed airplanes have eroded customer service, and he agreed, saying full planes have greatly contributed to this deterioration.
Shellenberger also pointed out what he calls a “curious anomaly”—that Southwest has the lowest load factors among the majors, yet has been the most consistently profitable. And it’s true: in 2010, Southwest’s load factor was 79.3 percent, lower than the domestic load factors for American (82.6 percent), Delta (82.9 percent), United/Continental (84.9 percent), and US Airways (83.2 percent).
And there’s yet another negative side effect to all those crowded airplanes. In early 2011, the aviation consulting firm Oliver Wyman released its Airline Economic Analysis and noted: “In a sense, as load factor has approached its theoretical maximum, fees have replaced it as a source of revenue growth.” That’s right: as long as cabins remain full, the big airlines will continue ratcheting up those fees.
Things That Go Bump: Airlines Deny Boarding
Those record-high load factors are fueling another disturbing trend: more passengers being bumped against their will. The industry calls them involuntary denied boardings and the DOT calls them oversales, but by any term it means your airline seat has been given to someone else without your consent. And it’s a practice that has become more prevalent in recent years. According to the DOT, 1.09 passengers were denied seats for every 10,000 passengers boarded in 2010, an increase over the 0.89 rate in 2005.
As Forbes.com noted, Broadway theaters don’t double-book seats: “No other (legitimate) businesses sell the same product to more than one customer, so why do airlines?” It’s an excellent question, but only industry apologists defend the practice, citing the vague complexities of yield management practices so vital to the airlines’ elusive profitability. They also note that passengers with refundable tickets often no-show for flights, thus leaving the airlines with empty, unpaid seats.
The good news is that the DOT requires that airlines provide those bumped against their will with denied boarding compensation, and in 2011 Secretary LaHood announced the DOT had doubled the limits on these amounts.
Meat in the Seats
Industry executives have had an attitude about airline seating for generations. In fact, designers once eagerly met with Eddie Rickenbacker, the famed World War I flying ace who became CEO of Eastern Air Lines, to show off their newest seat cover fabrics for the Lockheed Electra. Rickenbacker’s legendary response: “I don’t care what you cover the seats with as long as you cover them with assholes.” Boy, have the latest crop of airline execs gotten good at that.
Even Ralph Nader, who arguably knows more about customer satisfaction than anyone in America, sums up the airline industry in this way: “It’s about the consumer mistreatment. You need to buy one seat for your head and torso and then another seat for your knees.”
Obviously so much of the flying experience comes down to legroom. In fact, when it comes to airline seating, it’s specifically about something called pitch, an industry term for the front-to-back measurement of the distance between seats. SeatGuru.com is completely devoted to airline seating, so I asked Jami Counter of TripAdvisor, the site’s parent company, about the big squeeze. He agreed that full airplanes are affecting passenger contentment, and not in a good way: the more crowded the plane, the less comfortable the seats. “Load factors, that’s the biggest factor,” he said. “Overall, that leads to a negative perception for passengers.” He added that most travelers will suck it up on short flights of two hours or less, but expect more comfort on longer journeys: “At SeatGuru, our sweet spot is the medium- to long-haul flights. The three-to-four-hour market.”
I wonder if seats have shrunk in recent years, but Counter advised that, for the most part, U.S. domestic carriers have “stayed constant” with economy class seat pitch of about 31 to 32 inches on average. So which domestic airline earns kudos? It’s no contest, since one carrier provides seat pitch of 34 to 38 inches in economy: “JetBlue is the best by far.” (This was confirmed by Consumer Reports last year, when our airline survey ranked JetBlue at the top for seating comfort, and eight of ten carriers received low scores in that category.) And which is worst? Once again, there are no serious competitors since one airline is offering just 28-inch pitch: Spirit. Counter said, “That’s just cruel.”
But legroom is only half the battle—there’s also seat width to consider. Counter explained that evaluating width makes for an apples-to-oranges comparison, because some airlines offer slimline seats, newer lightweight models that offer more room. He also contended that the manner in which seats recline affects passenger comfort as well.
In 2002, Consumer Reports Travel Letter’s annual review of the best and worst airline seats included a report on a British ergonomics firm that found most standard airline seats are “totally inadequate” for larger passengers. While seat width generally falls in the range of 17 to 18 inches, an anthropometric table comparing average butt sizes worldwide indicated America ranked first—no surprise there—but at 20.6 inches, that’s a pretty tight squeeze in most economy seats. And there certainly is no indication that American butts have shrunk in the last decade.
To be fair to Boeing and Airbus and other aircraft manufacturers, onboard comfort usually has very little to do with the airplane itself, and everything to do with the airline configuring it. If you peel back the carpeting on a commercial jet, you’ll find that most passenger seats are locked into tracks or pallets and therefore the distances can be adjusted, between seats as well as between rows. For airline executives, of course, it’s all about cramming in more bodies—and they’ve all but perfected that dark art. Back in 1999 I wrote an article for New York magazine titled “Sky Box: Shag or Shul?” which detailed how customized cargo containers could be used by Virgin Atlantic to provide lounges, showers, and exercise and massage areas on its new Airbus fleet, while El Al could employ the same equipment as airborne temples on its Boeing planes. Neither of these plans was fully implemented, of course, because in the end airlines are all about carrying more stuff—be it cargo, mail, or people—and not about wasting precious space. So much for those Pan Am 747 piano bars that look so cool in the retro ads.
Labor leader Pat Friend, who began her career as a flight attendant in 1966, points out that United’s Boeing 757s used to be configured with a coat closet up front, but a few years ago it was replaced with another row of seats. When flight attendants asked management about it, they were told, “You can’t sell a coat closet.”
Now that the sacred cow of ancillary revenue has been slaughtered, amenities such as better seats and upgrades come with a price tag. On the Airfarewatchdog site, George Hobica recently responded to readers seeking the secret to nabbing an exit row seat: “And if you have to ask, you probably aren’t going to get one. Not without spending some money, anyway.”
What’s certain is that airlines will continue wedging in as many seats as possible, particularly in economy. So that requires that passengers not only work harder at selecting preferred seats at the time of booking, but also wade in with elbows and knees when it’s time to board the airplane. But all that jostling and wrestling raises another issue: in-flight etiquette.
“Civil” Aviation? Responsibility for Onboard Rage
If there was a demarcation line in the ongoing battle between passengers and airline employees, it undoubtedly came on August 9, 2010, when JetBlue Flight 1052 arrived at JFK in New York City. The details blur on the actions or nonactions of an aggressive passenger, but all agree that harried flight attendant Steven Slater spewed obscenities into the PA system, opened a door still armed as an evacuation slide, and bid adieu to a twenty-year career in aviation with beer can in hand. What followed was an American rite of passage. Arrest. Arraignment. Media storm. Morning talk shows. Folk hero to some, unhinged alcoholic to others.
Nearly a year after his day of infamy, I had a long and engaging conversation with Slater. I found him funny and insightful as we swapped industry war stories, and he told me he still loves aviation. He’s from an airline family—his father was a pilot for American and his mother was a flight attendant—and he began working for a string of airlines in 1990. (In fact, as a TWA flight attendant, in July 1996 he was in Rome, waiting to return to the United States on the 747 that exploded over Long Island as Flight 800.) Eventually, Slater landed at JetBlue, but he told me that the fun of working for the low-cost carrier wore off quickly.
“One huge resentment I have is that I made less in my twentieth year in the airlines than I did in my first year,” Slater said. He continued flying because he needed JetBlue’s health benefits and flight privileges, but by 2010 he was making $9,700 annually and commuting from his New York home to nurse his dying mother in California. Meanwhile, he was angered by what he terms JetBlue’s “lean” operation: “It feels like you’re being taken advantage of when you see new paint schemes and a new headquarters and the company naming sports stadiums.” At the same time, he says, the company had no money to improve conditions for crews.
I told him that I sympathized, that I certainly understood how airline employees, particularly flight attendants, have been in the front lines as passengers revolt against crowded flights and packed overhead bins. But I couldn’t justify “popping the slide,” since like all former airline employees I know that opening a door armed by compressed carbon dioxide and nitrogen could kill an innocent bystander. But Slater maintained that he assessed the situation, and told me, “I absolutely acknowledge the inherent danger. I know how to assess conditions. It’s not like I shot a gun in a crowded movie theater.” Then he added, “If anyone knows how to open a frigging door, it’s me.”
