I've wanted to post about this for a long time, but now that Spirit has finally gone bankrupt I feel like its an appropriate time.
Is it just me, or does the travel industry seem to be in a perpetual state of shambles? The conventional wisdom you get regarding this blames it on the pandemic, but I noticed the slippage really started around 2017-2018 or so. Here are some things I will say:
When it comes to things like airlines and rental cars, people typically default to whatever the lowest price is, which is understandable, but the desire to cut costs has spiraled completely out of control. This is particularly true for rental cars. You book your rental car months in advance and then get there and there are no cars, which seems to happen all the time. I've had this happen to me personally several times in the past 5 years and I don't even travel much anymore. These rental car companies are also waaaaaaaaay understaffed, if something happens to your car good luck getting someone on the phone to help you.
This brings me to my next point, if you rent from Dollar or Thrifty or something to try and save money I guess you kind of are asking for a sh*tty experience since the prices are so low. But many of the companies that used to be known for providing outstanding service suck nowadays as well. The whole reason Enterprise rental car was created and its schtick has always been superior customer service. Last time I rented a car I went to Enterprise because I didn't want to deal with the BS from the budget companies. When I went to pickup the only car they had in the entire lot was a Kona that REEKED of cigs...like I drove it for 5 minutes then turned around and gave it back. They had nothing else, so I had to call and make a reservation with another Enterprise location. So then I went to the other Enterprise location and they had no documentation of the reservation, so they tried to rent me what they had at like twice the price that I got on the phone. This is supposed to be the gold standard. Nowadays no matter who you book with, no matter how much you pay for service, you are likely going to deal with extreme understaffing/long waits, cars in completely unacceptable condition/not cleaned properly/smell like cigs/have something wrong with them. Then if something happens its impossible to get help.
I wrote a lot about the rental car thing but the same can be said for airlines. The industry has been in shambles for far too long. Huge amounts of delays to due understaffing, poor maintenance, disorganization, airports being way over capacity for what they were designed for, etc. I am not even joking when I say the last 4 times I have flown the flight has been delayed for reasons having nothing to do with weather, including the last 2 times being stuck on the tarmac for over 45 minutes just sitting there, and one of those times was stuck on the tarmac at MCO for 2.5 hours just waiting in a queue of planes for a gate. It took 2.5 hours to get from Chicago to Orlando and then another 2.5 hours on the tarmac in Orlando waiting for a gate to open.
And then there's hotels. So it wasn't that long ago that you had a pretty good idea what you were getting when you booked a hotel based off the chain and brand. Even the franchise hotels were pretty standard as corporations seemed to hold the franchisees more accountable (again prior to like 2017 or so).
Then the industry decided they were going to stop caring about any kind of standard and just start franchising as many hotels as possible, to whoever possible, to collect as many franchise fees as possible. And of course many are owned by private equity who have no interest in actually operating a hotel properly. Now there are no standards and you never know what you are getting, the experience varies wildly even with the same brand, and this goes for everyone (especially Hilton). Also the junk fees are completely out of control (although I will say this does seem to actually be getting better thanks to California's new law).
I'm just sick of it. I totally understood from 2020-2022 everything got screwed up, but even for a few years before that things were rapidly getting worse and that accelerated the nonsense and we never recovered. I spent my whole life working in the travel business and I just want it to do better....do better!
I totally get it there are hacks to try and work-around the misery, I was a frequent traveler for a long time. Also I many years working in the travel industry in Orlando, which is very heavily tilted towards families that travel once or twice a year, so my experiences tend to be skewed more towards sympathy for family leisure than with business (although I did spend years working right next to the convention center on I-Drive so I dealt with a lot of business travelers as well...and while business travel experience is better, it has gone downhill as well).
Hacks are not going to change that the way the industry operates is completely dysfunctional. When you get to the rental car location and there is a line of 20 people with one or two people working at the counter, and with all the paperwork and upsells and all that the line takes over an hour. Or you get there and there are no cars and no one has any solution other than wait there all day and hopefully you will get one eventually...meanwhile you can still go on the website and book a car for that time slot. That is an unacceptable way to run a business IMO, and it seems like thats how they ALL do it.
I haven't stayed much at Hyatt and am unfamiliar with many of their brands, I have found generally that Drury is the best. Family-owned company, not publicly traded so no shareholders, and there are no franchises to babysit so they all conform to a high standard. Also in addition to breakfast they also have dinner from 530-7pm included in the hotel price. It really illustrates how much better everything would be ran if there wasn't so much corporate consolidation over the last 20 years. There are many major markets they have not made into yet, however.
Can’t say I’ve ever had any such experiences with the rental cars, in fact it’s scary to hear that can even happen. The only places I ever get rental cars are in Orlando & SoCal, so I don’t know if that makes a difference or not.
With Hotels, the only thing you can ever bank on anymore, is housekeeping services being limited. It seems certain thresholds they crossed during the pandemic were in fact to a point of no return. I do second Hyatt for a preferred brand though, they just aren’t in every area.
It’s really everything though, not just the Travel Industry, that has gone to hell. I dread anytime I need to actually make a phone call, because it usually starts off with a long wait, and rarely has a happy ending.
I recently had to spend around 6 hours (over several days) to place my Softball Team’s annual uniform order. I’m not talking about dealing with “Joe’s Uniform Shop” either, this was with a major US apparel manufacturer that has their own brand of sneakers, professional athlete endorsement deals and all that. They couldn’t figure out how to get their own website to perform basic functions over the course of 3 weeks. I eventually figured out a loophole myself (on the customer side) to get what I needed.
The whole “get 3 bids” thing is also in the past. If you call 3 contractors to bid on a job, you’re lucky if you get 1 that is even interested. There has been no time like the present to become a DIY’er.
Common courtesy is also all but extinct. If you don’t have something that someone else wants in that exact moment, you can pretty much expect to be left hanging.
The World has definitely changed in recent years, and unfortunately not for the better…
PS - it took me 3 attempts to log in to this website to make this comment.
Sounds like you should have called Joe's Uniform Shop haha.
On Russell's topic of brand loyalty, ironically I used to really like Spirit and almost exclusively fly with them. Mainly because they were exactly what they said they were, get you from A to B as cheaply as possible, no frills, and everything is an upsell. But like I said before since 2018 or so they have miserably failed at the "A to B" part...there is no point in booking them to save money if they can't get you where you're going anywhere near on time to begin with.
We flew Spirit once up to Boston for a quick weekend back in 2018, and followed their rules to the letter to avoid paying any additional charges. However, most of the horror stories I hear about the troubled airline (that tried to merge/get acquired by JetBlue) is primarily because people don't understand the airline's rules or try to circumvent them/get cute with their interpretations. We didn't have an issue with arrival/departure times with Spirit, but I would guess some of their issues might be caused by passengers getting flustered at the gate when they're forced to pay for a bag or have to check something they didn't think they'd need to check (there are plenty of videos out there of people trying to stuff suitcases into the bag sizers).
Maybe we've had generally good luck flying (knock on wood), but the only time we've been significantly delayed on a trip was this past summer when Lufthansa cancelled our connecting flight from Munich to Gothenburg, which forced us to spend the night in Germany (paid by Lufthansa) before having to make a circuitous route to Sweden the following day (Munich to Hamburg to Copenhagen to Gothenburg). IT seems that Lufthansa has been dealing with a labor shortage, and randomly cancels flights on weekends, and our flight was the one selected. Luckily we were able to pivot pretty easily and adjust our itinerary and had lounge access in all of the airports we flew through.
What Kills me is that the seats Keep getting less space and the Prices keep going up.
Years ago you received a full meal now you get a small bag of mixed pretzels and 1/3 of a of soda.....
Progress? HAHAHAHA, NO
Greed destroyed everything.
Man, I miss the old days when you had bigger seats and more leg room on aircraft, and
...the guy sitting beside you could go through a half a pack of cigarettes during a long flight, and
...the jets were so loud that you had to have noise-canceling headphones with adapters to plug into the aircraft's sound system or else you were totally miserable, and
...the cost to fly was so prohibitive that only well to do people or business travelers flew on a regular basis, and
...there was always a small probability that your aircraft might get hijacked to Cuba, and
...you didn't have to put up with those pesky airline apps that tell you the quickest route through the airport or where to pick up your luggage or if your connecting flight has changed gates.
Road trips were awesome too, unless
...your parents forgot to order the trip maps from AAA, or
...the interstate that you were traveling on wasn't finished and you had to travel through 30 miles of uncoordinated stoplights on potholed roads, or
...the car broke down, or
...you forgot to bring the motel directory and couldn't find a Vacancy sign, or
...there were bees in the well beneath the seat in the roadside outhouse.
Yep, things were so much better back then - NOT.
I knew a smart alec comment like that was coming, hence why I said things started to go downhill in 2017. The problem is infrastructure and staffing related, talking about smoking and needing maps from AAA is just being an apologist for unethical (and in some cases should be illegal) behavior. The EU passed laws fining companies for doing these things and as a result these problems were basically eradicated overnight, and I think the new law for airline refunds passed by the Biden DOT was a no brainer.
@the_man7 - Yep, I was having fun, but I was trying to make the point that overall things are getting better - actually much better. I've been traveling commercially for almost 4 decades, and there are days when you feel like you're Neal Page in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," but for the most part, the the travel and leisure industry is leaps and bounds better than it used to be. Unfortunately, it is human nature to notice the bad and forget the good.
And Brian Emery is right in one aspect when he says that it is greed causing the problem, but I think it is our greed that is the issue. We want what we want, when we want it, how we want it, and we want it within our budget. The industry is just responding to the market (us).
I agree with both points here that the travel experience has gotten exponentially better over the past 20-30 years, but that there has been a distinct decline over the past 5-10 years as carriers have consolidated and have chased profits. I do think we've reached a point where airlines have run out of rocks to squeeze blood from, and the revised Passenger Bill of Rights has given customers more recourse when things go wrong so I expect things will either stay as they are today or slightly improve as customers wield a little more power within the marketplace.
Here are my thoughts, and I'll preface with the fact that I often utilize my company's travel booking portal to leverage preferred rates/fares.
I don't travel a lot for business (maybe 2 or 3 week-long trips per year), so it's not like I have crazy status, but we have found a number of "tricks" and ways to make the travel experience easier.
First, getting TSA Pre-Check/Global Entry is a great perk. We play the credit card game, and found a card that gives us free Global Entry that includes Pre-Check (the Global Entry interview process can be a pain because of a lack of appointments, but can be performed during an international arrival at many major US airports). Even when the Pre-Check line is not shorter than the regular screening line, it's nice not having to take off your shoes, belt, and separate your electronics/laptops from your carry on baggage. It's probably not worth the $75 if you only fly once or trice a year but the 5-8 times a year we fly, it probably is, and is definitely valuable when it comes as a perk with a credit card or other service (I've read some companies will pay for employees who travel frequently to get it).
Second, I SWEAR by National/Enterprise for rental cars, and have been using them almost exclusively for over 20 years. National was the first company to allow renters to bypass the counter and walk directly to their car (Emerald Aisle). Other companies have picked up on this (Avis most notably), but National still does it best, and I find it fun to walk the aisle to see what cars are available. On a trip to San Francisco back in 2009, we walked the aisle and found a cute red VW Bug, which we drove around the Bay Area and wine country for over a week, getting great gas mileage in a region that has notoriously high gas prices. More recently, I just got back from a business trip to Georgia where I had reserved a "Premium Pickup" knowing that I needed something with 4 wheel drive, but none of the trucks they had were 4x4. I instead walked the Emerald Aisle and stumbled upon a Jeep Wrangler that was perfect for what I needed. The best part with National/Enterprise is that my company has negotiated rates (typically no more than $75/day), which I can leverage for personal travel, so even on our trip to England in 2023, we were able to rent a nicely-sized MG for a very reasonable price.
For hotels, again, we tend to stick with certain chains based on our experience. Our chain of choice is Hyatt, which almost universally has nicely sized rooms in good locations with complementary hot breakfast. We will occasionally go with a cheaper option if it's just for a night or 2, but has sometimes come to bite us and make us understand why those hotels were so much cheaper than the big chains. I think when it comes to hotels, you should find a chain that you like, and stick with it so you can accrue loyalty points. It's even better if you have a credit card that allows you to earn loyalty points/free nights at the same chain, which is how we became fans of Hyatt.
I'm not sure what to say about airlines, because it does seem like it's a race to the bottom. Personally, we fly almost exclusively on Southwest in North America, but with their change to assigned seating coming later this year, I don't know if that's going to affect our affinity for the budget airline. We're lucky because we live near 3 major airports (Dulles - IAD, National - DCA, and BWI) that have numerous Southwest gates (BWI is a Southwest hub), and have also flown out of Philly, which is only 2.5 hours drive away, if we need to get somewhere unusual and don't want to connect through New York. Over the last 2 years, we've been traveling on a Southwest "companion pass", which is essentially a "buy one get one free" pass, so that's why we've been traveling so much on Southwest and have gotten used to many of the airline's quirks compared to traditional American carriers. I think my biggest pet peeve of many carriers is charging extra for checked bags (and why we tend to prefer Southwest). The trend to charge for bags is what has forced people to cram stuff into carry ons, which subsequently has led to gate lice and people wanting to get onto the plane first so they can claim overhead cabin space. If airlines gave people a checked bag as part of their fare, people wouldn't carry large rollaboard bags and try to get liquids through security checkpoints. However, just like when Disney broke the seal by charging for queue avoidance (Genie+ and now LL), the airlines cannot eliminate that stream of revenue so we are left with the consequences and all of the folks that think they can pack for a week's vacation without checking a bag.
I get it that traveling today sucks, but it's a small price to pay for the flexibility and freedom we have to travel thousands of miles in mere hours. I think if you travel even a handful of times a year, you get used to it, but it's the people who travel just 1 or 2 times a year that are either ignorant to the rules or try to cleverly circumvent them are the ones that make things worse for everyone.