
How Technology Has Failed to Improve Your Airline Experience - Vannatter
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/technology/how-technology-has-failed-to-improve-your-airline-experience.html
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anovikov
Well this happened in all other industries that the tech has 'upended'. Stuff
that happens to both guests and hosts in airbnb just can't happen in a hotel.
Uber is definitely a poorer service than taxis - with some nasty stuff
happening from time to time as well. This is unavoidable because all of these
were done to optimize just one variable - price.

I frequently converse with people on the airline experience, and rarely get
any understanding. People love crappy low-cost carriers with non-reclining
seats, nonexistent legroom, no meals, etc, because that is how they can afford
flying. Most people who fly now would travel by train or stay home if we
didn't have deregulation and those crappy low-costs.

The laws of scale also dictate that good airlines are destined to fail, their
cost disadvantage means they loose too many customers, and eventually their
cost go up because of lower scale, and customer experience goes down because
of less frequent flights and thus less convenient connections... they just
have to become as crappy as low-costs, or die.

A generation from now, we will have a choice between EasyJet and a Learjet.
With possible exception of a few very popular routes like transatlantic
London-New York and a few others.

A nice exception is Russia where there is no deregulation, Aeroflow owns the
sky and decides who can fly, and Putin pays for most of your (domestic) fare.
I never fly domestic flights in Russia, and international costs are not
subsidized, and not cheap at all, but quality is superb!

