January 20, 2007

It’s a new year and more Americans are traveling than anytime in the last seven years. I’m one of them. I also travel most of the other 51 weeks — almost 400,000 miles a year.

Unfortunately, the airline industry is the only one that stays in business by abusing its best customers. And now, much of the hotel industry is following suit. Service and hospitality are being replaced by bottom-line thinking — and the results are awful. For that reason, a few well-considered new year’s resolutions would be good for everyone involved.

The airlines should resolve to:

Abolish the asterisk. Stop insulting us by advertising a flight to Los Angeles at $184 — followed by the dreaded asterisk. Read the fine print and you’ll see the fare is really a one-way fare requiring a round-trip purchase. That’s $368, not $184! Why spend so much money trying to get our attention, only to anger us?

Find an exit strategy. Here’s a novel idea: When a plane lands at its destination, find a way for us to get off it. From the moment we took off, you’ve known what time we’re landing. So don’t make us late by sitting on the tarmac waiting for a jetway. In the good old days, they had portable stairs. Let’s use them. We promise not to complain about the 300-foot walk to the terminal.

Drop the catchy slogans. Delta is not ready when I am. If American truly knows why I fly, then why am I always stuck in the middle seat between two sumo wrestlers? Truth in marketing would require that all airlines substitute this simple catch-all phrase: “Sit down. Shut up. We’re going.”

Establish a Geneva Convention for passengers. Flying may not be torture, but it can be awfully close. Minimum treatment standards for high-altitude, tarmac, and runway captivity would be good for customers — and would help airlines answer this question: Are they in the passenger service business or the human freight business?

Hotel operators should resolve to:

Quote the real rates. There are excise taxes, occupancy taxes, sales taxes, and the let’s-have-you-build-our-sports-stadium taxes. We need to know what we’re getting into before we get our bill.

Abolish forced mood lighting. It puts us in a bad mood. We’ve got things to do — and see. Give us a 300-watt bulb with a dimmer knob, not a 40-watt bulb with an on/off switch.

Stop nickel-and-diming us. More than $1 for a bottle of water from the minibar should be a prosecutable offense. Period. We’ll figure out the specific criminal charges later.

But my fellow travelers aren’t off the hook either. You need to remember:

Just because it has wheels doesn’t mean it’s a carry-on. There’s a big difference between portable and transportable. People have brought automobile driveshafts, dead grandmothers, and a stuffed moose into passenger cabins as roll-aboards — it’s just wrong.

Your lunch is everyone’s business. Just because airlines stopped serving food, doesn’t mean you have to bring your own. Nothing smells worse than a half-eaten bag of fried food in the seat-back pocket of the guy sitting next to you on that five-hour transcon.

Undress before you get to security. The lines are long enough. I don’t want to stand behind you while you discover whatever’s been in your pockets since 1987. Reverse your conditioning — undress before you get to the airport. Dress after you pass security.

These resolutions don’t require much capital investment or great physical exertion; they’re common sense. Unfortunately, they’re also probably too much to ask.

After all, I’m writing this while sitting on a delayed La Guardia-bound flight that pushed back on time but is stuck on the tarmac. Assuming we ever leave Miami, and assuming we land in New York, and assuming there’s a gate, I’ll check in to my hotel in about five hours to find a dimly lit, “cutting edge” room with a $7 bottle of water on the desk.

For more of Peter’s blog, check out the “Travel Detective Files”.