(Gate 44, Washington National Airport): In December and January, I’ve taken 20 separate flight segments for family reasons and\/or business. Two flights have been canceled outright and at least another eight have been seriously delayed. I guess nothing could be more boring than complaints about “the airlines.” Still, I wonder:<\/p>\n
1. Does anyone review an airline’s decision to cancel, rather than delay, a flight? I presume that a delay costs the airline more money, because it has to be pay overtime and perhaps divert an airplane. A cancellation, however, costs the passengers much more–not only time, but also cash for wasted airport parking, ground transportation, food, etc. Canceling a flight that could instead be delayed–thereby shifting costs to the customer–should be penalized. Right now, we can’t even get reliable information about why flights are canceled.<\/p>\n
2. What’s wrong with the market as a whole? Why doesn’t a competitive market produce more reliable service, at least by some of the major carriers? This is not a rhetorical question–I believe that markets sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and we should be able to diagnose the reason for failure in this case.<\/p>\n
On a couple of occasions, I have fantasized about massive civil disobedience by passengers. For example, one morning, I pictured the enormous line for check-in at Dulles sitting down and refusing to budge until the airline started to issue apologies and vouchers. But the difference between a sit-in and ordinary service would have been difficult to detect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Gate 44, Washington National Airport): In December and January, I’ve taken 20 separate flight segments for family reasons and\/or business. Two flights have been canceled outright and at least another eight have been seriously delayed. I guess nothing could be more boring than complaints about “the airlines.” Still, I wonder: 1. Does anyone review an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}