Flying the Unfriendly and Pricey Skies

When I was 33,000 feet above the ground recently, being served dinner on a flight from Amsterdam to New York, I cheerfully informed the flight attendant I’d like white, not red wine with my chicken a la king. 

“Wine?” she chuckled. “Oh sweetie, we haven’t served complimentary wine since 2001.”

As a jittery flier who calms her nerves with a small amount of Chardonnay, I knew this flight was going to cost me.

Things got even worse when I transferred to the domestic leg of my journey: entertainment that had to be purchased (despite the paid adverts that scrolled across the screen for the duration of the flight), and not a crumb of food to be consumed without a credit card transaction.

In short, all the amenities I used to take for granted were now strictly paid-for affairs. Where’s the outrage, I wondered?

“The changes have been introduced gradually,” said Paul Hudson, president of the American non-profit airline consumer organisation FlyersRights.org, of airline travelers’ acceptance of the fees, disallowances and more. “It’s like the frog in hot water. First the water is cold, than it’s warm and then it boils. But the frog doesn’t jump out.”

And apparently, neither do airline passengers. “Initially there was some backlash,” said airlines analyst Savanthi Syth of Raymond James, a financial advising company in the US. “It is always hard to start charging for something you have offered for free in the past, like with online news. But people got used to it.”

Industry turmoil

Why have so many services we took for granted — pillows, magazines, free wine on international flights — disappeared? Rewind to 2008, when the price of oil reached $147 a barrel. For the legacy carriers that had already struggled through the post-September 11, 2001, collapse in air travel, it was another do-or-die situation.

“How are we going to survive?” analyst Bob McAdoo of the investment bank Imperial Capital recalls was the industry question of the day. He recounted how American Airlines’ leadership team gathered to brainstorm solutions to offset the high costs of fuel. One employee suggested the airline start charging for checked bags. The expected revenue from that change was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“I don’t know if it’s going to work,” McAdoo recalled American’s CEO saying at the time during a conference call describing the changes, “but how can I not try it? It’s the only thing that comes close to making up for the $147 barrel of oil.”

By Lauren Comiteau