More passengers dissatisfied with airlines

Go ahead. Ask a plane full of commercial airline passengers how many like to fly. How many hands do you see waving overhead?

These days, it’s apt to be a big round number, and that number is zero.

Nothing, many airline passengers say, is as abhorrent about travel these days as flying. Ask passengers whose luggage has been mishandled; there are more of them. Ask passengers whose flights continually land way behind schedule; there are scores of them too.

In fact, ask just about any passenger, and you’ll hear tales of woe so pitiful that a recent survey showed the airlines are more despised than the Internal Revenue Service.

Can it get much worse than that? Yes. And it’s just about to.

Welcome to the summer of our discontent — when an increasingly surly public meets an incredibly stressed system. Fasten your seat belts, friends. Bumpy doesn’t begin to describe it.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes the state of traveler anger over air travel as much as the case of Bella Miller.

Bella is a terrier-Lab-mix puppy. Or she was in January 2005, about the same time as ire toward airlines was steadily growing. Bella was supposed to fly from Chicago to Jacksonville, Fla., on the same flight as her owner, Kristen Miller. The flight landed, but no puppy was delivered to baggage claim.

The only employee Miller could scare up in the nearly deserted Jacksonville airport was largely indifferent, Miller said. She was furious that her dog was missing but she was almost as mad at how her problem was handled. Miller was so irate, she said, that the employee threatened to call security.

Bella, missing in action for the next 20 hours, finally turned up in Jacksonville “starving, terrified,” Miller said. “She smelled atrocious, and she was stiff for days.”

Which is exactly how many of us humans feel after a flight. Consider these statistics:

Airplanes are flying fuller than ever — about 80%. That means if you miss a connection, you’re more likely to be stranded because there is no flexibility to reschedule.

More baggage is mishandled. In March, for every 1,000 passengers, almost eight filed mishandled baggage reports. Last year, that number was fewer than six (Department of Transportation statistics).

Flights are late. In 2002, 82% of flights made it within 15 minutes of published schedules, which is considered on time. In 2006, 75% arrived within that window. For the first three months of 2007, that number was down to 71% (Bureau of Transportation).

People are mad about all of the above. The number of consumer complaints to the DOT nearly doubled in March of this year from March of last.

In February’s Iconoculture, a publication that charts consumer trends, Kate Muhl, a consumer strategist who covers transportation, travel and leisure, writes: “It sucks to fly. Seriously, the horrors of air travel might now be the one unifying American experience.”

So color today’s travelers cranky. But do the airlines really have us in a headlock or is our pain self-inflicted? History suggests it may be both.

Still cheap to fly

The angst of airline travel has its roots in deregulation, which was designed to increase competition and decrease ticket prices. The marketplace would regulate air travel, and consumers would be the big winners.

The airfare free-for-all in the last three decades suggests that consumers have benefited — fiscally, anyway. The average domestic airfare in 1995, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, was $359, which equals $484 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. Those same bureau statistics show that last year we paid only $380 for the identical ticket.

This makes no sense, especially when you consider that in 1995 a gallon of West Coast gas cost $1.22, but it certainly has allowed more of us to learn how to fasten a seat belt.

And so flying, once considered the province of the rich and powerful, has essentially become public transportation. Goodbye, glamour; hello, flying Greyhounds.

By 2000, more people than ever were flying, but they also were complaining more. Congress considered a passenger bill of rights but abandoned it after airlines promised they would play nice.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, a disaster that sent airlines scrambling to fill seats. The carriers got a break from our badmouthing.

It didn’t last.

As the horror of 9/11 subsided, passengers began returning to airways, slowly at first, then, lured by lower fares, in droves. Nowadays, planes fly almost 80% full. That means more passengers to contend with, more problems to solve, more bags to handle — and all with 28% fewer airline employees than in 2001.

“As I see it, the airlines have been in this race to the bottom to see who can operate an airline with the fewest employees,” said Terry Trippler, an airline expert at MyVacationPassport.com. “I don’t know who is the winner, but the air traveler is the loser.”

A consultant who flew often, Bradford Hudson felt as though he was on the losing end of the airline equation. Now he’s an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration and tries to avoid flying. “I think it’s just a bad consumer experience,” he said. “Obviously, there are exceptions, but [you have] really small seats that don’t recline properly, people misbehaving, unpleasant or overworked staff, delays — you name it.”

If I were to name it, I’d call it “The Flight of the Living Dead,” the spine-tingling tale of a system so frayed and frenetic that passengers in weather-whipped Denver, Dallas and New York last winter were stuck for hours in airplanes that neither took off nor turned back to the gate.

Slam these circumstances hard up against consumers’ expectations — they still remember the days when people dressed up to fly, hot meals were served and personnel had time to care about them — and it is not just the perfect storm; it is an F5 tornado.

Now the airlines that have sown the wind are reaping the whirlwind. Not only is Congress reconsidering a passenger bill of rights, but the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index survey, released May 15, also showed that the airlines ranked below the IRS.

Refocus on service

If airlines can no longer differentiate themselves based on price, their only chance at distinguishing themselves may be with service. For personnel handling more passengers than ever with less backup, who has time to provide extraordinary customer service?

Whether it’s the financial pressure, safety fears, the stress of serving an increasingly demanding public or some wicked combination of all three, airlines seem to have moved their customers from the “friend” column to the “foe.”

Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor of CruiseCritic.com, was recently on the receiving end of this newly adversarial relationship. On a U.S.-bound flight from France, she encountered a flight attendant so unpleasant that Brown asked a second attendant whether she could be served by someone else. No. 2 said she would check.

The first attendant came “storming over.... ‘How dare you tell me I’m rude! It’s your perception that I’m rude!’

“About two hours later, she comes by and offers a half-hearted apology — sorry if she seemed stressed out — and gave me all these excuses ... By then, I didn’t care what her problems were.”

Such experiences run counter to what travelers find these days at many hotels, especially luxury lodgings, which seek to build relationships by anticipating customers’ needs.

P.M. Forni, author of “Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct,” told me recently: “Social intelligence is a much more accurate predictor of success at work, in school and in life than the kind of intelligence that we measure with IQ.”

So it doesn’t really take a rocket scientist to figure this out. In fact, it’s so easy even a puppy can understand it.

catharine.hamm@latimes.com