Are Flyers Fed Up?

Eileen Sailer is one air traveler who wasn't broken up when Northwest Airlines went on strike. A health-care consultant from Denison, Iowa, Sailer had her bad air day on Northwest last June, when she traveled from Minneapolis, Minn., to Washington. First, her 2:30 p.m. flight was delayed 2 1/2 hours because a cabin door wouldn't shut. Then, after the passengers had boarded and the plane was backing away from the gate, there was a jolt that knocked over several flight attendants; a wheel had fallen off. After a two-hour repair delay, the plane finally took off--not for Washington but for an unscheduled stop in Detroit, where the passengers had to scramble to find another flight to Washington. They finally arrived at 1 in the morning. Sailer was so upset at the mishaps and the "apathy and rudeness" of the airline's personnel that she wrote a letter complaining. She never got a reply.

Service is just now returning to normal on Northwest, following settlement of the pilots' strike that shut down operations for nearly three weeks. But for many disgruntled flyers, normal service isn't anything to look forward to. Customer complaints about Northwest, for everything from canceled flights to surly ground personnel, were mounting well before the strike and now lead the industry. Northwest officials blame many of the prestrike problems on labor slowdowns, but others think the trouble is more endemic. Some travel agents say they routinely try to avoid booking Northwest for customers with a choice. General Motors grew so annoyed with the airline's spotty on-time record that it now uses a new airline, Pro Air, to fly employees between Detroit and New York City.

Northwest's problems may be worse than most, but they're hardly unfamiliar for an industry that, amid soaring profits, seems to have left customer service on the runway. Planes are more cramped, meals are less filling, and the cost of business seats has climbed steadily over the past few years. With widespread discount fares, the average ticket price has stayed relatively low, rising less than the rate of inflation. But restrictions on those fares are getting stiffer, and pricing practices have grown so byzantine that no layman can hope to fathom them. The hub system--in which each airline feeds its flights into one or more central airports--has boosted service for many passengers, but it has also exaggerated the effect of weather delays, created longer airport lines and increased frustration. "Airlines don't think they're in the service business," says John Tschohl, a Minneapolis-based customer-service guru. "They think they're in the transportation business."

Complaining about airline travel is, of course, as American as booing the umpire in baseball. And despite those meager snacks that have replaced hot meals on most flights, it's easy to forget how smoothly the industry has turned air travel into an affordable, convenient and (despite tragedies like the recent crash of a Swissair flight) overwhelmingly safe mode of transport. Some carriers, moreover, seem to be doing things right. Southwest Airlines, for example, has won high marks by offering cheerful, low-cost service and eschewing the near ubiquitous hub system. And Continental, for years an industry stumblebum, has improved substantially under new CEO Gordon Bethune.