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Plus, some expert tips on navigating the busy travel season
“A mess.”
“Hellish.”
“A crapshoot.”
Air travel in the United States these days is…rough. And it’s not likely to get markedly better before the holiday travel season, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s when nearly half of Americans plan to travel.
“What we see, and what we continue to see, is that the desire to be together with grandma is enduring—it just does not fade,” says Samuel Engel, a lecturer in marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and a management consultant to airlines. “That’s great, that means that we’re human and we’re connected people.”
But it also means, for an industry that sustained drastic pandemic-era changes, a bumpy road ahead.
Of these shifts, Engel says, there are two that continue to produce aftershocks to this day: a significant decline in business travel and chronic staffing shortages.
“Business travel demand just has not recovered to the same degree that leisure travel demand has,” he says. With many flights effectively grounded early on, the pandemic forced companies to conduct business online, often with videoconferencing technology such as Zoom—which also rapidly improved during this time period. A nascent evolution in doing business sped up and took hold.
For airlines, the loss (and slower recovery) of these business travelers has had a noticeable impact on the bottom line. Business travelers, many of them more frequent flyers than their leisure traveling counterparts, were much more willing to pay top-dollar for a convenient flight, Engel says.
In effect, the business of business travel often subsidized the relatively lower-profit leisure travel. With less demand for business travel comes fewer flights and higher-priced tickets for leisure travelers.
Airlines have a compounding problem: “There’s a shortage of skilled, credentialed labor that most acutely affects pilots—who have recently negotiated some of the most generous contracts in history that will start to have a painful bite on airline profitability, just as some demand is dropping,” Engel says.
While the long-term consequences of these new contracts are just starting to emerge, pilot shortages also have a more immediate chilling effect on small airports and routes.
“When pilot labor is scarce or more expensive, it becomes less feasible to fly smaller routes and smaller planes,” Engel says. “So, we’ve already seen that service to smaller communities has fallen off.”
Separately, airlines are also facing a critical shortage of air traffic controllers, and have been for months. Unlike in other countries, air traffic control is a government-provided service in the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) trains and employs air traffic controllers, who are then responsible for overseeing service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers a day traveling across the more than 29 million square miles that make up the country’s national airspace system.
By its own account, the FAA is lagging behind its hiring targets. And the shortage means that at some airports, controllers are working mandatory overtime and six-day workweeks to cover the gaps in coverage. Still, there have been several near-misses at facilities across the country.
“The FAA is behind its hiring targets, and travel demand has rebounded faster than many people expected,” Engel says. “It’s still just running tight; there’s less give in the system, and that becomes evident during the peak times.”
He compared it to Massachusetts’ mercurial, traffic-prone Route 3: “It’s fine—until it isn’t. And, ”why does traffic stop in Boston when it rains? There’s about nine people who drive to work instead of taking the T, and it pushes the system from free-flowing to overburdened.”
All is not lost, though.
Engel, who says he’s quick to switch his flight if “creeping delays” suggest it may be canceled—and recommends others do the same—uses the opportunity of a change in plans to enjoy a bit more time wherever he is. A canceled flight at night is just a chance to enjoy dinner at a restaurant, he says, and a relaxing evening in a hotel.
And even the most frustrating situations take on a new light when one stops to reflect on the modern marvel of flight, Engel says. “I’ve been in this industry for over 30 years, I’ve been flying since I was a kid, and I continue to pause and reflect on how amazing this is: what an incredible thing this is, what a historical revelation this is, to be able to move around the world like this.”
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