September
12, 2003, 11:30 a.m.
Tycoon Class
Fly
business, pay the pirates.
he airlines plead that they continue to lose money, though they had a
reassuring quarter. There has been a lot of talk about a passengers' bill
of rights, and it is true that the airlines are indifferent to substantive
complaints of their customers. Yes, they will attempt to give quicker
service when asked about flights and departure times, relying fruitfully
on the Internet.
What they studiously avoid discussing is the piracy that attaches to business
class travel. Regulation of airfares is effected by competition, which
is as it should be. What is largely unnoticed is that in business class
there is practically no competition. All airlines opportunize on the customer
who craves uncramped travel.
Getting
the price of an air ticket is something akin to shopping in a Chinese bazaar,
one traveler recently commented. It is true that there are services —
one thinks of Expedia.com — which will line up airfares from Point
A to Point B with marvelous speed, permitting you to give your preferences
for date and time of departure, and to opt for non-stop. But if you want
business class, the fares are pretty uniform. Uniformly high.
An example, only
one week old. To travel Washington to Phoenix to New York is $600, economy.
By business class it is $2800. To travel New York to Geneva by economy
is $500, by business, $3,000. The penalty, in the first instance, is about
450 percent. In the second, 600 percent. It's easy enough to divine the
undisclosed reason for the high penalty fare — the airlines find
people who will pay the price. What is hard to find is an objective reason
for the larceny. There is more leg room and hip room in business, but
not six times as much.
The perpetual quarrel
over the regulation of air traffic eased off after 9/11, in part owing
to the sharp decline in air travel. Air travel was severely affected and
some airlines had to put a part of their inventory of planes into cold
storage. The traveling public sensed that the travails of travel, which
include baring one's feet in order to establish that there is no hidden
nitroglycerine under your sole, are accepted as part of the price we pay
for travel in the Age of Terrorism.
The airlines apparently
ignore the resentment felt by those, especially older people, who yearn
for the relative comfort of travel in business class accommodations but
can't afford the tariff. Of if they can afford it, are resentful at their
complicity in the piracy. The traveler to Geneva by business class is
accepting a surcharge of about $475 dollars per hour of travel. To pay
$475 per hour to permit you to stretch your legs or to lean back in your
seat an extra fifteen degrees is resented as idolatrous indulgence. It
is the equivalent of paying not $200 for a hotel room, but $1800, because
it is twenty-five percent larger. "Why do you travel third class?" I once
asked an urbane Austrian intellectual who bridled at self-indulgence.
"Because," he said, "there is no fourth class."
The late William
Rickenbacker, the inventive and witty son of the war ace and president
of (the late) Eastern Airlines, proposed 40 years ago a sensible way to
permit the traveler a range of choices and the airlines their deserved
profit. The ongoing mistake, he reasoned, is the airline's serving simultaneously
as carrier and as marketer. The way to go, he counseled, is for the airline
to auction its space in great blocks. "Who will pay $20 million for space
on 5,000 Eastern Airlines Flights, New York to Miami, January 1 to July
1. . . . Do I hear $22 million? Going for $21.5 million, going . . . gone."
Let the wholesaler
then sell the tickets for whatever price he can get, which takes into
account the urgency of the flight and the comfort level. That broker would
send you business class to Geneva for $100 — if the seat you occupy
would otherwise go empty.
The wholesale broker
could, without inflicting pain, vary the price of an airplane passage
taking into account all relevant factors. As it stands now, the traveler
burns with resentment at being asked to pay six times the cost of the
lesser ticket.
But the problems
of the business class traveler aren't likely to arrest the attention of
our governors, and elderly people are difficult to organize. Perhaps this
is one for the AARP.
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he airlines plead that they continue to lose money, though they had a
reassuring quarter. There has been a lot of talk about a passengers' bill
of rights, and it is true that the airlines are indifferent to substantive
complaints of their customers. Yes, they will attempt to give quicker
service when asked about flights and departure times, relying fruitfully
on the Internet.
What they studiously avoid discussing is the piracy that attaches to business
class travel. Regulation of airfares is effected by competition, which
is as it should be. What is largely unnoticed is that in business class
there is practically no competition. All airlines opportunize on the customer
who craves uncramped travel. 
