Opinion: American Airlines’ emotional baggage
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The baggage-fee-proliferation watch goes on, but so far American remains the only airline charging customers a fee for checked bags.
L.A. Times readers are speaking out on the new fee. Some highlights:
With obesity at an all time high, airlines should start charging by the weight of the person flying... This helps the airline, actually, as fewer families will fly on the airline yet more business people (who norm ally only have a briefcase or such) will fly on the airline... If they are going to charge for luggage, I say we only pay the charge if we get it back!... Are the executives at AA not smart enough to just add $15 to the price of a ticket?... I find this as pure discrimination as well. If you are a man you can easily fly without packing all of your toiletries, but since TSA has their 311 rule most women who care about their appearance and have long hair far exceed this rule...
So much for my not-so-secret desire to start rocking full drag... I’ve never had much time for complaints about air travel inconveniences. I don’t like air travel or think of it as a right. Instead, I hate air travel but respect it as an achievement that should not be considered any less wondrous just because it’s been publicly accessible for nearly a century. That’s a point I tried to make the last time I editorialized on this topic, in the halcyon days of Ol’ ‘99, when customers were attempting to stage a congressional revolution against the uncaring airlines:
If you keep your sense of entitlement under control, you remember that being able to fly is something you should be grateful for under any circumstances. Anybody who isn’t sufficiently impressed by the intrinsic luxury of being packed into a metal tube and whisked across continents in a matter of hours — who insists that the miracle be accompanied by chicken or beef, honey roasted nuts, and uninterrupted screenings of Chairman of the Board — deserves to be wheeled and swung into the sunlit silence without further oxygen. In fact, the dogfight over in-flight customer service is a textbook example of the principle that service with a smile just makes people miserable in the end. You’ll never see a fight over the lack of complimentary cocktails aboard a bus — the mode of transportation that, when all is said and done, most closely approximates the experience of air travel (while being inexplicably more expensive). In fact, we believe the whole issue will be solved not by better customer service but the absence thereof. If passengers are ever to learn the true nature of High Flight, it will be by getting less of what they want and more of what they deserve — no food, no movie, no windows, less leg room, and no service crew (except maybe a security officer who’s not shy about using the Taser on anybody who speaks out of turn).
How times have changed (and how history might have turned out differently if the airlines had just followed my taser-armed-security-officer advice back then). Nobody talks about passenger bills of rights anymore, and with good reason: The airlines are going out of business because they’re charging less for the service they provide than it costs them to provide it.
That structural problem seems unlikely to be addressed by a $15 fee, but as one of the commenters above notes, it may have the effect of driving away customers who should be taking land transport anyway (I’m looking at you, passengers with kids in tow). Whether you’re into reducing the carbon footprint, upholding a rational and transparent market or ending our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil, all trends point in one direction: Air passengers need to be paying a price that more accurately reflects the costs of flying people around in jet airplanes.
On the other other hand, I got this Spirit Airlines spam today...