Air travel is getting worse, judging from the number of consumer complaints.
Consumer complaints about airlines nearly doubled in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year and kept soaring in April and May, the U.S. Transportation Department said Wednesday.
Those are the latest figures from the government. The Transportation Department said information about complaints has been delayed because there are so many of them to process.
The department said it received 24,965 complaints about airline service in the first three months of the year, up 88% from the first quarter of 2022. Consumers filed another 6,712 complaints in April, up 32% from a year earlier, and 6,465 in May, an increase of 49%.
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The worst part about airlines isn’t the actual flying. That’s safe and just as magical as the first time I flew in a plane when I was a kid. I still say “WOW!” out loud when we climb up through the cloud layer to that brilliant sunshine and perfect blue sky.
It’s all the parts except for moving through the air that suck. The seats, the other passengers, the airports, the fees, security probes, waiting in lines, uncomfortable and expensive terminals.
They took an amazing, magical experience that was a dream for thousands of years and enshittified it.
Adding on too, the pandemic-era increase in the airport enshittification experience.
Airports have restaurants and services, then the pandemic starts, and of course, a whole bunch of them close. Now a few years have passed, those services have more limited hours, and some never came back. It is much more difficult (and of course, expensive) to have access to services in airports than pre-2020. I’ve been through several hubs recently and it’s just flabbergasting how terrible it is to even try and find something basic like food.
Airline passengers are a captive audience trapped in an airport, especially during connecting flights. Airlines/airports should bear the cost of ensuring services are available any time flights are. They should bear the cost of keeping restaurants open later than 5PM. A quantity of airport services matching the passenger load should be available at flight times in respective terminals.
It’s easy to figure out, they know the manifests and schedules.
They should also have some sort of fallback process in place for when flights get trapped overnight in airports to take care of the passengers. It doesn’t need to be a free service, but at least doing something like: on call employees come in to run shops so passengers can buy goods.
It is dehumanizing. On the other hand, road trips are liberating.
I’d rather drive 18 hours than fly three hours. Mostly because the three hour flight is really more like six to nine hours because of getting to and from the airport, security, delays, etc.
I would love to see a reputable researcher try to calculate total lost revenues from travel avoidance.