A protest at Heathrow worth having

How the hell do they get away with it?

I took the day off yesterday to pick up some relatives from Heathrow. The flight was supposed to come in 10am. It eventually landed at 7pm. And because of some hassle with the baggage, we only left the damn place at 10.30. A hellish experience for all involved.

Nothing new though, right? Most of us have gone through this. But in any other service industry, if you treat your customers this shoddily, you'd soon be out of business. And the question that came to mind was: how do the airlines get away with it?

Well James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, used his column in The New Yorker this week to answer the question:

The airlines’ explanation for the sheer misery of flying is that the important problems—bad weather and an antiquated air-traffic-control system, resulting in overcrowded runways—are out of their hands. But those unavoidable difficulties have been exacerbated by the airlines’ strategic choices, most notably their decision to cut the number of workers they employ and the number of big planes they fly...

Oddly, none of this [the constant delays and bad service] seems to have hurt the airlines — more people than ever are flying, and ticket prices remain relatively stable. In part, this is because, for many trips, there’s no meaningful alternative to flying, which limits the power that fliers have as customers. They can make certain choices — they consistently go for the cheapest flights, making it hard for an airline to raise prices — but anyone who vows never to fly with a particular airline again will likely have an equally bad experience on a rival carrier soon afterward. Like consumers of regional utilities or like drivers who tolerate bad traffic day after day, fliers have accommodated themselves to misery. It’s little wonder, then, that the air-travel market rarely punishes an individual airline for failing to get people to their destination on time: consumers assume, with good reason, that the options are interchangeably awful.

Shocking. Anyone want to start a protest at Heathrow with me?

Murad Ahmed

Comments

[Dru Brooke-Taylor]

I couldn't agree more. The airlines still think they are in the days of Imperial Airways when it was a big adventure and they were doing you a favour to let you fly at all.

Even the railways are expected to arrive and depart on time - though I'd better not get started on any service organisation that threatens those that complain with prosecution and takes it for granted that it can charge people to park while they are using its services. What restaurant does either of those?