how to fix airline flight delays
Flying in North America, especially in the US has become a bit of a joke lately. I can’t remember a flight that I have taken to the US in the last 2 years that didn’t delay me by at least 4 hours if not 20 or more. It’s not much better in Canada (with the one shining exception that is Porter Airlines who have delayed me a TOTAL of maybe 1 hour after 20 or so flights, and that was due to a thunderstorm). And there is no accountability. Airlines are legally responsible to you for NOTHING other than offering you a refund though in all fairness in nearly all situations they do try to eventually get you to your destination following the guidelines outlined in the infamous rule 240.
The worst scenario is when this happens between connecting flights leaving you stranded in some foreign city which is neither your home nor your destination. This is akin to a bus stopping at a diner in the middle of nowhere, halfway through a trip, and stating that they are more than happy to offer you a refund for the portion of the journey not completed and then driving off leaving you there to figure out how to get home.
The reason this happens is not too difficult to understand. First, airlines have no reason to change. They are all struggling financially and are looking for anyway they can to save a buck. Our free market system should root out the bad airlines because people should be voting with their dollars and deciding who stays in business and who does not. But this is where another problem lies. Airline tickets are not cheap and when people are looking at a list of tickets prices on say Kayak or Hipmunk, they usually buy the cheapest ticket on the list because it is saving them a LOT of money.
But people forget to calculate the potential cost of airline delays. Missing a connection to your destination may have the added cost of you staying the night at a hotel and paying to get to and from the hotel you have to pay for (or you can always sleep on the airport floor as one Delta attendant told me after refusing to pay for a hotel stay for me). It also means you miss out on the first night of your vacation, diminishing the enjoyment you get, never mind the stress, anger and frustration you experience.
How do we fix this?
Simple. At the point of purchase, when people are voting with their dollars and looking at those high prices, each ticket should be displayed with a score that measures their ability to get you to your destination on time RIGHT BESIDE THE TICKET PRICE. For each airline, the score should display, as a percentage, the total number of flights that are delayed and cancelled as well as the average number of hours people are delayed by the airline.
As soon as people start taking into account the cost of delays, I can imagine that they will start re-evaluating which ticket really is the cheapest. Hopefully this will encourage airlines to get better at being on time or at least better at dealing with delays and cancellations.
All of this information is freely available online and so there is no real technical challenge to providing it. All that has to happen is that a booking site has to decide to provide it. And let me tell you, as soon as someone does, I will NEVER book a ticket anywhere else.
