Musings at Altitude

I had a new experience today, one that I’m still pondering hours later – here’s the picture:

It’s still hard for me to believe, but I paid $2 to get a Diet Coke on my flight from Charlotte to New Orleans today.  If I had known there was a charge, I probably would have stayed asleep, but I was foolish enough to pop up right when they got to my row, quickly said “Diet Coke please” while trying to become semi-conscience after my usual take off snooze, and then fumbled around trying to find dollar bills in my pocket while the flight attendant stood there holding my drink and certainly not giving it to me till I popped out the cash.  I must admit though, that Diet Coke tasted mighty good for that $2.

I’m not sure the $2 bothers me nearly as much as the $1400+ that I had to pay for the airfare though.  I made the mistake of waiting till the last possible minute to buy my multi-city trip ticket for this week, not knowing my full itinerary till three days prior to the first leg of the trip.  My penalty for my lack of maturity in scheduling was a grossly overpriced ticket and thus unfavorable routing on an unfavorable airline and a $2 Diet Coke.

As a businessman, I’m fully aware of the crisis affecting our airlines primarily blamed on the price of fuel and also fully aware that if they don’t find ways to generate cash then several of them may this time truly go under.  By “truly go under”, I mean that they won’t go bankrupt eliminating a lot of debt and then come back and try again, but this time, they very well may have to truly fold.  As a 100,000+ mile per year flier who is dependent on the airlines to get me to where I have the face time I need to be relevant in leadership and relevant in revenue creation, I’m becoming increasingly skeptical and scrutinous of the costs passed on to the business travelers and the lack of any sign of reciprocal efficiencies appearing in the airline operations.  I fully understand that there are lots of things complicating efficiencies – labor agreements, current aircraft inventories, route structures, and even regulations – but if the most frequent travelers are going to have to feel the pain of the current economic environment, then it sure would be nice to see some form of innovative offerings in service that would show their patrons that they fully understand the pain being passed on.

IMHO, don’t pass on the costs by charging for everything – bag checks, drinks, pillows, blankets, pretzels, etc.  Instead, admit that ticket prices have to go up and charge legitimate costs for the flights.  Also, admit that the way airlines operate today has to change and take radical action to start making those changes.  In these times, I’ll more than willingly (ok…maybe not) pay more for the same or worse service if I see some plan to make things better long term.  But I don’t see that plan.  What I see is higher costs for almost comical service and “extras”, and then everything blamed on the rising cost of fuel. 

Unfortunately, I’ll just keep traveling and keep smiling, knowing that we won’t have sanity soon in this industry.  Who knows, maybe I can somehow dream up that unthought of miracle fix that all the airline leaders haven’t thought of and then save an incredibly important component of our economy. 

Since that’s not very likely, I’ll just savor every sip of this incredibly expensive can of Diet Coke.