We all know about the flight cancellations occurring right now. Sometimes, ya never know if you are REALLY going to have your flight take off until the last minute…
Well, I just read this article, and I found it very interesting…
I wonder if you can ask Johnny on your next segment about the issues mentioned in this story. Just curious what he might say about (or even if he is willing to go near the topic)
The truth of the matter is pretty simple. There is no real [financial] penalty for selling a promise you never intend to keep. The airlines lobby the government like everyone else, and thus the politicians are seemingly unwilling to pass or enforce rules that would penalize the airlines for not actually providing fair and honourable service as they are licensed to do. It’s too easy for them to pretend like they’re going to run a flight every n hours but then when those seats don’t sell enough that the flight won’t be profitable for them, they can just cancel a bunch, combine the rest, and it’s the poor passenger who gets hurt by this, and not the airline.
There is also the “great resignation” and the fact that people are no longer to work for peanuts to keep rich companies (airlines in this case) getting richer. Airlines operate very expensive machines, and they need fully trained staff, which means they can’t just get more employees on a whim. Now that they want to scale back up, they’re feeling the cost of having treated their employees like replaceable cogs in their machine. Even if they smarten up and start offering better wages and employment conditions, it will still take them a long time to acquire and train up staff to replace the ones who got fed up and walked away.
In a different industry that does the same thing to their staff, Amazon has leaked an internal memo that says before two more years they won’t be able to get enough new staff. It turns out maybe there are consequences for hugely profitable companies treating your employees like disposable diapers.
Europe is in a similar position, but it is usually the ground staff that aren’t there. The pilots were kept on, for the part, but the ground staff were let go and have often moved on to other jobs.
The same with the entertainment and gastronomy industries. The restaurants and bars and venues were shut for over a year and they had to let most of their waiting staff go. Again, these people have moved on to other jobs, so there are shortages everywhere.
The UK had it a little different, the pandemic coincided with Brexit and a lot of ground and waiting staff came from Europe. The call of Brexit was getting jobs back from those ‘dirty foreigners’ and give them back to Brits, only the jobs that have been freed up aren’t popular.
It’s a mess. Actually preventing us from seeing US family at the moment because we don’t trust the airlines.
On our last trip, they cancelled our domestic connection a couple of weeks before our trip, so we rearranged. Then that flight was cancelled whilst we were in the air flying to the US. We were stranded in ATL trying to get onto already overbooked flights with hundreds of other people. Got on a flight the next day in the end.
On the way home the domestic connection was late (lack of maintenance crew), so we didn’t make the flight back. They wanted us to fly to Paris instead with a 6-hour layover 