( AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File )
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This hour, we're going to do two segments on Thanksgiving stressors. Coming up a little later, a pre-Thanksgiving call in on the fraught holiday question, what are you anticipating at your Thanksgiving table regarding the Israel-Hamas war and how do you plan to handle it? That's coming up in a bit. Right now, I'm sure some of you listening are either packing suitcases or listening in a taxi right now on the way to the airport.
Surely spending valuable time with family and friends is worth the hassle, but flying seems to be the ultimate hassle these days more than in the past. Think about it. What's more miserable than waiting on the never-ending TSA line at JFK or squeezing into that middle seat in between two strangers who won't concede an armrest, unappetizing airplane food, $10 water bottles, canceled flights leaving you stranded in God knows where USA? We could complain about flying for the length of the entire show if we wanted to.
Those are just the traditional complaints about flying. Flying seems to be extra miserable recently. We're going to ask, does it have to be this way? It seems like there's so many issues going on with each individual airline right now, as well as the system as a whole like a tangled ball of yarn, where do you start to pick out the knots? Well, according to our next guest, we can get to the root of the mess by addressing policy mistakes that led us here.
Joining us now to discuss his latest book, Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It, is Ganesh Sitaraman. He's a law professor and the director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation, as well as a member of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. That's a mouthful, Ganesh. Welcome back to WNYC.
Ganesh Sitaraman: Thanks so much for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Let's just start on some of the particular problems before we get to the policies. Purchasing tickets is one. I've heard that using certain models of computers or booking at certain hours of the day can change ticket prices in ways that are completely not transparent to the buyer. Why are these costs so variable and not clear?
Ganesh Sitaraman: One of the things that we've seen airlines do is move to a system in which there's really a proliferation of different kinds of fares, fare classes, and dynamic pricing in which the prices change if you buy a ticket a day before versus a week before, and sometimes it even seems like Tuesday morning versus Tuesday evening. Then you add on top of that added fees to pick your seat or check a bag. We've really had a kind of explosion in the variations of pricing.
It's because all of this is a good way for the airlines to make more money, but it comes at the expense of all of us who travel and have to navigate these really complicated and opaque systems.
Brian Lehrer: What's up with frequent flyer points? You write that they essentially create a system in which airlines become banks. What do you mean by that?
Ganesh Sitaraman: In the old days, you may have thought your frequent flyer program was going to the coffee shop at the end of the block, buy 10 coffees, get the 11th one free. Over time, they've evolved into partnerships with banks and credit card companies. In some ways, how much you fly, it doesn't really matter at all. What matters more is how much you spend on the credit cards.
What the airlines have done is created a system in which they issue a lot of points that's something they just create out of thin air. It's basically a currency except that they decide how much it's worth and they decide when and how you can spend those points too. I think for a lot of people, this has really come to be an area that looks really beneficial but it's not always that beneficial. Airlines can change the terms of these deals.
Earlier this year, Delta announced that it was going to make it a lot harder to get high status and that the benefits were going to change as well. They can also devalue these points by making it more expensive to redeem points in terms of purchasing a flight. For all these reasons, I think for a lot of people, there's a real question of whether these programs are actually that valuable.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you are invited to call us with your biggest flying gripes. What's your number one issue when it comes to flying these days, especially if it's new? If you've been flying for a long time and flying is always a hassle in various ways like some of the ones I mentioned in the intro, but things seem to be worse recently. Pandemic-related or not, what's changed with flying that you would like to complain about, that you would like to gripe about, and ask why it's happening and what can be done about it?
212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Or you can raise flying and policy questions, which we're going to get into with our guest Ganesh Sitaraman, author now of Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, call or text. Let's do some political history here, Ganesh. You describe the deregulation of US airlines as one of the swiftest, most thoroughgoing policy changes in American history. This goes back to the Ralph Nader consumer advocate and Watergate days, right?
Ganesh Sitaraman: Yes, exactly. From the 1930s through the 1970s, we had a very different system of how airlines worked in America. In the 1930s, Congress decided that they wanted a reliable, stable Airline system. What that meant was ensuring that there would be access all across the country in small cities and midsize cities in every different region, and they also wanted a measure of competition, a balance, a Goldilocks between having too much competition, which might lead to bankruptcies or too little competition in which you'd have monopolies.
They created a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board, and what their job was to ensure regulated competition that airlines would fly to lots of different places, and so they allocated routes to airlines so that they would serve some more smaller, low-volume cities, and some high-traffic cities too. They regulated prices as well. Over that 40-year period, we saw more and more people flying, prices went down at a steady rate.
We had big innovations like the shift from propeller planes to jet planes from regular jets to wide-body jets. By the '70s, this system really came under attack. That's the period that led to deregulation and this massive overhaul in how airlines operate.
Brian Lehrer: Do you think deregulation has been both good and bad for flyers and in different ways?
Ganesh Sitaraman: Yes. I think both periods, the regulated period and the deregulated period have pros and cons, and there's trade-offs in all of these systems. What the deregulators proposed was that if we just let airlines fly wherever they want, whenever they want, and to charge whatever they want, everything would be better. They didn't think there would be a lot of downsides. They thought there would be dozens-- one person even said up to 200 airlines operating efficiently in the market if we deregulated.
They painted this very rosy picture and said, "We should get rid of this system that looks like regulated competition in favor of unregulated open competition." The problem is we didn't end up in that dream world, we ended up in something more like the Hunger Games right away, in which airlines were engaged in really cutthroat competition, where you had new entrants coming in with low prices, but they didn't have unionized workforces.
They weren't serving necessarily the smaller cities, but instead, were on the high-traffic routes. When the big airlines fought back, undercutting them even more on prices, unifying their networks into these big hubs, they ultimately pushed out the small airlines. After dozens of bankruptcies, and mergers, and labor management strife, and congestion, and worse service, by the end of the '80s, you had the same big airlines running the show as you did during regulation just without any regulation.
I think for consumers, what this has meant is we're now really at the whim of what airlines want to do rather than having some guardrails around things like where airlines fly, and what service they're required to offer, and also around pricing.
Brian Lehrer: Joe in Middle Village, Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.
Joe: Hi, Brian. Long-time listener and first-time caller. I'm an entertainment travel specialist. I've been doing this for 25, 30 years. I'm basically dealing with this even newer draconian platform that's coming down the pipe for the airlines called NDC, which stands for New Distribution Capabilities. Basically, they're going to take the airline product and turn it into like the stock market with their algorithms where everything is going to be based on supply, and demand, and on an instant, and a turnaround, and even including not just the fares, but the seats, and bags. It's becoming a big a free for all. American ahead of the other carriers went ahead and implement this back in April. Fired all their sales representatives and just to prove how far out this is from ready to be rolled out, their system crashed. Over the last several months they've been trying to figure it out and it just makes things crazy where fares and costs depending on where and when you look at them are constantly fluctuating.
Brian Lehrer: Ganesh, this sounds like something you're probably familiar with, yes?
Ganesh Sitaraman: Yes, the fluctuating fares problem and how technology is changing that is really a big issue. When you think about how systems used to work before technology, it was simply harder to have dynamic or personalized pricing. Now as we have better data collection as almost everything you do on the internet has these cookies that are tracking what you're up to, the ability of companies to be able to target market has increased significantly. I think in the airline industry, that means that we're going to see increasing dynamism in how the pricing systems are set up. Again, this goes back to not having a regulatory regime around it that says maybe we don't want that to be the case, because you think about where there's opportunities for exploitation. If there's only one route with one player on it, one airline flying it, that's an opportunity for exploitation. If you need to buy a ticket at the last minute because you've had a death in the family, you don't really have choices. You can't go in two weeks. You have to go now. In those moments, you're vulnerable to higher prices. I think that's a challenge that we can solve. It's a policy problem. We can solve these problems we just need to do so.
Brian Lehrer: Joe, thank you for your call and your story. Please call us again. Are you advocating price controls per se, because a free market advocate might say, supply and demand is a reasonable thing to allow to control prices. If you have a whole airplane full of empty seats to sell, okay, maybe you're going to charge $59 a ticket and try to fill up those seats. If you only have one seat left on that plane, the laws of supply and demand do say that seat is very valuable, maybe you can charge $600 for it. Should the government step in and say, "No, you can't?"
Ganesh Sitaraman: I think this gets to a fundamental issue about how we think of airlines. From the 1930s to the '70s, as I described, people thought of airlines as a basic transportation infrastructure. A public utility in which this was an industry that was an essential service to so many businesses, communities, individuals and that it was in a way a public service. We needed to have access that wouldn't be exploited. It's not the same as a restaurant. There's a lot of restaurants in your town or on the street, and you can have some that are expensive and some that are cheaper. This is a different kind of service, it's more like your electric company. We actually don't want them to be rationing electricity or charging higher prices to people who live in rural areas or may live a little farther away. That was one vision.
The other vision, the vision of the deregulators, was that this is a business like any others and we should just have all the traditional rules apply. I think that's a really big divide. To me, one of the really telling moments is what happens when there's a crisis. We've had two big crises, September 11th and COVID, in which people didn't want to fly. Demand went way down. Even though the airlines had made tons of money in the years before that, they came to Congress and they asked for taxpayer bailouts and support. Congress obliged, both times, bailouts and a big support program. To me, that almost proves the point. These are companies that are too important to fail. We can't let them fail, because of how essential they are. If that's the case and they're going to have these special privileges, they should have some obligations too.
Brian Lehrer: Joe in Tenafly, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.
Joe: Oh, hi, Brian. Thanks for having me on. There's lots of things to hate about the airlines, but what I really despise is what they've done to the seats, the sizing, the width, the depth from the seat in front of you. It feels like I'm a sardine in a can. I'm just wondering why can't the federal government just issue, since it could be under a safety regulation, a regulated size and width just for safety purposes. I've had a flight from New York to the west coast where I was in between two hulking strangers with their arms on top of me. The other thing about seating was I was on a trip to Florida with my family and we couldn't book all three. We had to pay extra to do that if we wanted to. I just don't understand why they can't keep families together. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Ganesh. Are the seats smaller or is it just our impression as we get bigger that the seats are smaller than they used to be?
Ganesh Sitaraman: Seats are smaller than they used to be. They have shrunk over the decades, and people are also bigger too. That's not about eating too much or something. We're healthier, we're getting taller as a species. We have both things going on at once, and to the point, the federal government and Congress can do something about this. I'd encourage people who are upset about seat sizes to call your Congress people and tell them to fix it, because they can issue rules for safety reasons and for convenience that we should have minimum seat sizes. I think that would be an important shift. One thing that's interesting when you look historically is in the regulated period, because you had in that time the government setting prices. Airlines had to compete over quality of service. What you saw instead by the 1970s was really wild race to the top on service rather than what we have now, which is a real race to the bottom. You saw things like steak dinners in airplanes and piano bars in airplanes. I don't know where you'd fit a piano now in an airplane, but back then, there was a sense of making the experience better and that's how you were going to compete for customers.
Brian Lehrer: It was a real luxury item in those days. That must have been a long time ago that there were piano bars on airplanes.
Ganesh Sitaraman: Very long time ago, in the early '70s. Yes, it was a big difference in how the system worked. I think it shows that the structure that we set, regulation or not, what kinds of regulation create all kinds of incentives. The airlines are going to operate and try to be competitive within the set of incentives that we set. Right now we have a system in which smaller seats, more fees for baggage, that's where the incentives push them. We could instead redirect that into improved service if we wanted to.
Brian Lehrer: Here's a flight attendant calling in. Jonathan in Bayonne. You're on WNYC with Ganesh Sitaraman, author of Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. Hi, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Hi. How are you? Good morning. I've been a flight attendant for about 13, 14 years, and the airline I was hired under was merged into another one. What I would like to hear maybe your guest address is what I have noticed is a decay not only in the worker benefits, I've also seen a decay in the service. I've also seen a decay in how the actual customer's treated and the management is more tone deaf than I've ever. They used COVID as a weapon to restructure some of these companies and these union contracts and different things like that. Now it is absolutely out of control. I'm talking about when we have an irregular operation. People waiting on the phone to the contact center for eight and 12 hours just to find a hotel room. Or when the pilot or the flight attendant can't get a hotel room, then they're not legal to work flights which then further triples the industry. All management cares about is marketing. There's nothing to do about the consumer or providing a better product or supporting the employee that actually delivers the product. Its gotten so awful.
Brian Lehrer: Do you think as a flight attendant, on that point, and I think your big picture message here is things are getting as much worse for the flight attendants as they are for the customers. But if customer service and the flying experience is so bad, wouldn't that be the worst possible marketing that a company could do?
Jonathan: Well, what they try to do is they're trying to reinvent themselves with clever schemes of creating one consumer versus another consumer. One employee versus another employee. When I was hired, it was all about a culture of using good judgment, because there's a lot of things that we face on a daily basis. When you're dealing with the traveling public and you're dealing with machines and you're dealing with weather, you have to accommodate for and you have to work together. Now it's completely a top-down approach. It's a completely numbers based system of they think that, oh, you didn't score well on that flight. Well, the survey that the consumer got after they had been delayed five hours, because you had people out of position, of course, they're going to take it out on the survey. What they're doing, they're creating this warring zone of us versus them and it's a mess. I see our CEO quoting Joe Biden, even when Trump was in there. All this type of-- It's absolutely ridiculous how that--
Brian Lehrer: Jonathan, I'm going to--
Jonathan: -the government.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that insider's view and stay safe up there. To any of that, Ganesh, but is it just that there's so much demand for flying that they have the flyers over a barrel and the quality of the experience doesn't matter anymore to the company's bottom line?
Ganesh Sitaraman: I think this is a big part of the story. One thing we've seen is consolidation in the airline industry. The promise of potentially having 200 airlines is really laughable today. We have four big airlines that fly to most places. If you're trying to fly from one place to the other and there isn't a lot of competition at the time you want to go, you are out of luck, because it may take a week to drive across the country. You're not going to walk from New York to Los Angeles. You don't have a lot of choices that are reasonable choices.
In that context, consumers are powerless. You can't just say let's boycott the airlines if you actually need to fly somewhere for business or to see family over the holidays or anything else. A lot of the substitutes are not real substitutes. Again, it's not a market that works in the normal way where you can decide, "Well, we're not going to go to that coffee shop anymore, we'll go to another one, or not to that restaurant. We'll go to a different one." This is different. We don't have the choices that we would need for that market to work.
Brian Lehrer: Let me squeeze in one more question from a listener on this "dynamic pricing that takes place." Listener wants to know, do airlines raise or lower the price if they see that you've been looking online at a certain flight?
Ganesh Sitaraman: It's a good question. I have heard mixed things about this. I've heard from a number of people that if you do your incognito browser, you'll be better off. Others say that this is not correct. I won't speak for the airlines on that, but I think it's a good question. The fact that we even have to ask the question, is what the problem is. Why do we have a system in which all of us think we're being deceived and that we're being surveilled in trying to buy these tickets instead of just having transparent prices where you know how much it's going to cost to fly from one place to another.
You can predict that and it doesn't change if you look today and then you look 15 minutes from now after you've had a chance to check with your spouse of whether you can really fly on that date or at that time and now the pricing has changed. That's not a system we should have. We should have a reliable system.
Brian Lehrer: Last question in our last minute. In your book, you describe how Democrats and Republicans who can hardly agree on anything for some reason at the time, back in the '70s, fully supported the deregulation of our country's airline industry. The Democrats and Republicans both did. Have opinions changed with all this dissatisfaction about the experience? Is there political will now to reign in the oligopoly that destroyed American air travel that you describe in your book and talk about some of the policies that could improve it?
Ganesh Sitaraman: My hope is that we can do that. Part of the reason is there are people who fly in every state in the country, in every congressional district in the country, and they're of every political view. If we think about the principles for fixing air travel I have three that I talk about in the book. The first is no more flyover country. I don't think we should have a system in which smaller cities, rural places don't have access to service. I think we should have service everywhere, because there's lots of talented people all across this country who should have economic opportunity and their communities should get economic growth. Second is no bailouts, no bankruptcies.
We should want a successful healthy airline industry, not just in the boom times, but one that can withstand challenges as well without needing taxpayer support. Third, fair and transparent pricing, which we've talked about a lot. I think these are things that lots of people should be able to get behind. My hope is like in the '70s, we may today be able to have a strange bedfellows coalition of members of Congress who are just fed up and ready to make change.
Brian Lehrer: Ganesh Sitaraman, author of Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. He's a law professor and director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation, as well as a member of FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. I'll say goodbye to you with a short text that somebody wrote to us, "Pete Buttigieg, are you listening?" Thank you very much, Ganesh.
Ganesh Sitaraman: Thank you.
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