The Privileges of the Airline Industry
February 18, 2007If we have come to the point that a TV host such as Bill Oreilly, who normally focuses on things like culture war, child sex predators and the Iraq war, chose to dedicate his “Talking Point” segment of the February 15 show to the airline industry, it is a sign that things have really been getting out of hand. Oreilly talked about a serious incident that happened a day earlier, when the U.S. east coast was suffering from a major ice and snow storm. The weather conditions resulted in several JetBlue planes being stacked on a JFK taxiway for as long as 11 hours, full of tormented passengers. The airline returned the passengers to the terminal only when they finally understood that there will be no departures that day.
This incident came only 6 weeks after a similar incident took place in Austin, TX, involving an American Airlines plane. Then the passengers were stacked on the taxiway for 8 hours.
In my opinion, there is no point in analyzing these specific incidents. The big picture is clear enough: the airline industry is operating in a business environment that is totally different from any other business environment, for its customer’s worse. In any other service industry there are basic rules that say you as a customer pay the service provider only in exchange for a full and approved service. If you are not satisfied with the product, you have the full right not to accept it, and of course not to pay for it. When the differences between the customer and the service provider are deep enough, both sides may go to court.
When it comes to the airline industry, those rules do not apply. An airline is the only type of business in the world allowed to sell a product which does not exist. It is called “overbooking”. This procedure – legal procedure as of today – enables the airline to sell, on a given flight, more tickets than the number of actual seats on the plane. The airline assume, based on past experience, that when the boarding time will arrive, some of the passengers who bought tickets will not show up for the flight for various reasons, and there will be enough seats for everyone. Sometimes that is true, but sometimes not. And in those times the airline must deny some of the passengers the right to get the product that they have paid for – boarding the plane and flying from point A to point B on a specific date and time. According to the FAA, approximately 1 in 10,000 passengers in the U.S. was dumped from a flight in 2006.
Let’s think about it: can we imagine that 1 in 10,000 movie theatre visitors will be dumped from the theatre after he paid for the movie ticket? Can we imagine that 1 in 10,000 customers of an internet supplier will not get his internet connection? Can we imagine that 1 in 10,000 patients who enter an E.R. will be dumped from the hospital just like that, with no treatment?
The airline industry, for a number of reasons, managed to create for itself an alternative set of rules, which nobody would have tolerated in any other branch of the world economy. Those rules are highly discriminative against the customer, and never the less, we find ourselves in the year 2007 still accepting them and following them, to the extent of absurd incidents such as those that took place in New York and Austin.
