Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts

Friday, June 8, 2012

Airline non-innovation


As mentioned before, getting people on and off of different modes of mass transit adds a tremendous amount of time to the process, not to mention annoyance. One of the many things people hate about air travel is the waiting in line, first to get your boarding pass* then to get through security and finally standing in the unairconditioned jetway and the even stuffier plane itself (not to mention the wait to get off the plane once you've landed)

What if there were a way to cut that boarding time in half?
Kenneth Button, a George Mason University professor of transport economics (and editor of the journal that published Steffen’s 2008 paper). Airlines want a boarding scheme that works for every flight, not one such as Steffen’s that might save time on some flights but cost minutes on others. “They want something that can consistently save two-to-three minutes on every flight,” Button says. In terms of pure speed of cabin loading, Button suggests airlines use both front and rear airplane doors, as some European carriers do.
Actually, since we're talking about a double queue, I would assume it would on average more than double the speed since more people would end up in the faster line..Faster loading and unloading would save the airlines some money and they would greatly improve customer experience.

All of which raises the question: if it's such a great idea, why don't we see twin jetways all over the place? The answer certainly has something to do with up front costs but I think there's a bigger reason. I'll spell out the theory this weekend.


For more airline news, check out this NPR story.




* yes, I know you can print those at home but if you have to check you bags there's no time savings.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Question about Airlines

Mark Thoma tweets:

MarkThoma Mark Thoma
Just once, I'd like to be able to get on the plane at the scheduled time, and make all my connections. Once doesn't seem to much to ask. Grr


I cannot agree more. Why is it so difficult for modern airlines to provide basic services? Why is the city bus more likely to be on schedule than Delta Airlines?

Monday, January 3, 2011

Incentives, the TSA, and a question for Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen has a post up looking at a Washington Post article on airports considering private options to the TSA. The underlying assumption here is that competition will improve service and satisfaction but neither Cowen nor the Post writer address the big question:

Why should market forces act differently on security than they did on the rest of the industry?

From the moment you miss the shuttle to the long wait for your bags to come down the conveyor belt, air travel may provide the worst customer experience of any major industry. It's true that introducing market-based incentives a few years helped give us cheap flights (though I don't know enough about the underlying economics to say whether they actually bent the curve), but it did nothing to improve a system that was inconvenient, poorly designed and indifferent to the needs (not to mention feelings) of passengers -- pretty much the same problems that market forces are supposed fix in airline security.

In most industries, competition forces players to maintain reasonable customer service and to come up with customer-facing innovations, but only because almost all of the customers can easily choose between different products offered by different sellers. Cars are a good example.

Three years ago, I bought my first new car, a Nissan Altima hybrid. It had been about a decade since I had bought a car and I was amazed by the innovations that were available in mid-priced autos. Some of the innovations were impressive from a technological standpoint like regenerative braking and continuously variable transmission (the first automatic transmission I actually enjoyed driving), others were just well designed like dual climate controls and cleverly arranged storage compartments, but all were indicative of tremendous effort and ingenuity focused on providing me with a car I would like to own.

Nissan invested all of this into my car because they knew that Toyota and Ford and Volkswagen and a number of other companies also made cars I would like to own, just as the dealers I bought the car from knew that other dealers also carried the make and model I wanted.

Market forces don't address every potential automotive concern. There are externalities and asymmetries of information to be taken into consideration but putting those aside, competition has done a great job. The auto industry has produced a stream of innovative, appealing products because the makers and the dealers both know that I have plenty of choices.

But what would happen if customers were frequently forced to buy one particular make and model and having a choice in dealers might mean going a hundred miles out of your way? Then the automotive industry would probably look a lot like the air travel industry.

There are major constraints on where you can build an airport. Even if you put aside safety and environmental concerns, there are limits to how many airports an area can support. At the risk of stating the obvious, every flight is associated with two of these airports and your flying options are based on the worse of the two. For example, I'm based in L.A. My co-blogger, Joseph, teaches in a college town in the Southeast. I have an unusually large selection of airports, including LAX which, as far as I know, is serviced by all the major carriers, but if I want to do a face to face collaboration with Joseph I have to fly Delta because that's the only major airline that services his airport.

For the majority of itineraries, passengers have little choice as to airports and often as to airlines (market forces exert enough pressure on airlines to give a reputation for good customer service some value -- look at Southwest -- but not enough to make it standard -- look at almost everybody else). This lack of choice greatly limits the pressure market forces can exert on airport-based services. How many people would drive an extra hour or two (we're talking about a round trip) to save a few minutes in the security line and to have access to a better food court?

If anything, competition will do less to improve customer satisfaction with security than it will with the rest of the services airports provide. Whether done by the TSA or private firms, the basic procedures remain the same and it's the procedures that have people upset.

Of course you might get people driving out of their way to avoid things like full body scans, but that's an entirely different discussion.