Airlines, risk and consequences
As I sit here, waiting for my miniscule regional jet to arrive from somewhere “else”, I am forced to contemplate the risk/reward situation with airlines and passengers. Basically, airlines have pitiful few direct consequences when they are painfully late. If I were to show up 3 hours late, like my plane is, and thereby miss my flight, I would be expected to fork over at least $100, and if I hadn’t called ahead, they would have invalidated my ticket and I would have lost all of it—in this case $600+.
What happens when the airlines is late? They might, if they’re feeling particularly magnanimous, give me 2,500 frequent-flyer miles that have a real-world worth of something approaching approximately, $70, if I had to buy them. Not nothing, but when combined with the value of the time that I’ve wasted, not much. And that is totally within their discretion.
If we were to change the rules so that airlines had to pay for being late, and that figure escalated as time passed, then I think this might put the balance back in the system to encourage the airlines to better manage their resources, and the FAA, by proxy, to better manage the slots. If there were potentially tens of thousands of dollars on the line, I bet they’d manage their flights better. It might mean fewer flights, on bigger planes, less frequently, but that’s ok in my book.
This entry was posted at 7:08 pm on 8 October 2007 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Wow, Godwin’s law in one comment—certainly a new record. That and channeling Ayn Rand is quite an accomplishment.
I believe he is exempt from Godwin’s law, because he was noting Hitler’s socialistic tendencies, not jew-killing tendencies. Is it Godwin’s law if he mentions Hitler as one of the oddly large number of histories influential people with one testical? I think not. (in case you were wondering, Napoleon, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lance Armstrong are among the others)
No, I think Godwin’s law just applies to childish “you’re worse than Hitler” comments, which generally imply that the person making the comment was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and therefore we should all call it a day.
And his point is quite valid. Further regulation of the airline industry won’t speed anything up. Most delays now are indeed caused by regulations based on safety, or bad weather. Neither of which can be fixed by more regulations. Less regulations and more competition are the only ways to speed things up, but where safety is concerned we often have to live with an annoying level of government oversight.
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Congratulations, you are entering the realm of central command economy! Join your colleagues Adolf H., Benito M., Joseph S., Mao T. T., Kim Y.-I. and Hugo C. in that line over there.
“If we were to” is the wrong beginning of all thoughts that lead to economic coercion, restriction of liberty, and eventual loss of efficiency and economic productivity.
I would in fact be fairly willing to bet that your existing complaints against airline efficiency all have roots in existing regulation whose ostensible purpose is to “protect” you as a consumer, but which in fact serves to entrench existing players and to stifle competition.
The free market approach to this is: if you own an airline, then you get to choose on what terms to offer your service. If you don’t own an airline, then you get to choose which one of the existing airlines to fly with.
If you find the existing options unsatisfactory, then the approach of the businessman is to create your own airline and fill the perceived market need. If you were right, and you filled an important need, your alternative will grow successful. If you were wrong, your airline will fail. And so we learn.
The bureaucratic approach to a lack of unsatisfactory options, however, is to force existing players to offer them willy-nilly. In this case, if you were right, you get to claim the credit for doing what the market didn’t. Yet.
But the other hand, if you were wrong, your new rule is likely to stay in place even if it is inefficient, and you’ll likely not be held accountable for it.
See the lack of accountability?
If you are that dissatisfied with travel, get some friends together and see if you can do better. If you can’t, because the rules prevent you, complain about too many rules. Don’t complain about too little rules because the government is not forcing the existing companies to dance to your tune.