Nickel & Dime and Hide 'n' Seek

May 3, 2010

For a moment, let’s go back to the part where I said I blame the airlines for making flying unpleasant. They will happily tell you that it’s not really them doing it. They say that it’s all about the customer. They are, after all, merely trying to give the customers what they said they want. Namely lower fares. They can prove it, too, as they have conducted numerous surveys on the topic and the answer has always been that the majority of the customers would rather dispense with the unnecessary niceties and reap the benefits of saving some cash through lower airfares.

I have been involved with some of those surveys.

The questions were always written such that the outcome could be relatively easily predicted, or at least I thought so. The questions were always along the lines of:

“Would you rather have a glass of complimentary champagne or lower fares?”

-or-

“Would you like to have a salad with quail eggs with your in-flight meal or lower fares?”

I believe they would have gotten a more accurate indication of how the traveling public truly feels (or at least how I feel) if their questions were more along the lines of:

“Do you enjoy having your ass crammed into a seat that’s two sizes too small for an AVERAGE person, or would you rather pay a reasonable rate for a more comfortable seat?”

Ah, but that is not the way those surveys went. Granted, the general public IS cheap and will more often than not pounce on any form of savings without really giving any consideration to what they are NOT getting in return. Such is human nature. So is being greedy. If people weren’t greedy, swindlers wouldn’t be very successful. However we don’t excuse the con artists because of their victims’ greed, rather we vilify them, and correctly so, for the acts they commit. As far as I’m concerned, the airlines and the con artists are like two peas in a pod.

And with these inane additional fees, they are going way beyond the survey results to squeeze as much as possible out of their prey. At the risk of belaboring the point that I’m not a big fan of all the fees and charges that are being imposed, I will mention that one of the “cheap” (although it’s getting difficult to tell them apart now) airlines recently imposed a $45 fee for carry-on bags. I truly believe that there will be no end to this. It has often been mentioned in things I have read that pay toilets are on the horizon, and I’m not so certain that they haven’t already arrived. Ryanair has it in the works. I’m sure that there will eventually be charges for using the kiosks for self check-in and a fee for asking for information at the information desk.

The fees, however, are not always apparent. Several of the airlines whose sites I have visited are burying those fees in their fare structures. And there are now as many different fare structures and classes of air travel as TSA has ways to steal your stuff.

So... it'll be about a year from now that I'll be going full-bore on the planning for Zeb's Odyssey XIV. Because of that, I have now begun going at it on a more casual basis. I've mostly been looking at airline websites for itineraries to San Diego and Phoenix for this coming summer so as to get a feel for what I will be dealing with this time next year. I have a headache now. It's not all from the fares, though. (At least it’s not from the dollar amount of them as much as from the number of different ones.) Mostly it's from trying to decipher what you are getting for the money being spent. Each airline has a wide variety of “amenities” associated with each of their classes of travel and many of them also have a wide variety of different fares within a single class, especially economy class. It does take some work to figure out what is or is not included in the price of your ticket.

I’ll have some details in another post.