Gulliver | Passenger satisfaction

Is United Airlines really that bad?

A writer for the New Yorker blames the United-Continental merger for a litany of evils. But there's more going on here.

By N.B. | Washington, D.C.

TIM WU, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, wrote an essay recently about why he, a long-time customer of United Airlines with more than 700,000 miles flown, has decided to "leave" the airline. Here's the meat of it:

On the “new” United, seats got smaller as the airline jammed more people into the same tube; upgrades, to escape the sardine effect, seemed to become harder to book. The number of boarding groups began to resemble something like a caste system; “change fees,” which have always been outrageous, grew higher (two hundred dollars for domestic, three hundred dollars for international), while baggage fees soared to as high as a hundred dollars. The cross-country flights somehow seemed to all be on old, broken-down planes, while gate agents and flight attendants all just seemed crabbier. Yet, I remained, through the indignities, the outrages, and the general descent into lousiness.

I suppose that everyone has his breaking point. For me, it was while trying to pre-board an overcrowded flight to Miami with a noisy baby in my arms, only to be ordered back in line by a curt agent. At that moment, I realized that United had quietly eliminated the traditional practice of pre-boarding “passengers with small children,” choosing to favor a few elite fliers over the convenience of everyone else....

The United merger is a grand example of a consumer sinkhole—a merger that proves to be not just a onetime event but an ongoing disaster for consumers (and shareholders) who suffer for years after. I wasn’t the only one who noticed the airline’s descent. Since 2011, United has piled up a mountain of consumer complaints (according to one report, only Spirit has more per passenger) and has repeatedly tallied some of the worst quality rankings in the nation, trailing even discount airlines like Frontier and AirTran. A website named Untied.com collected these complaints; United tried to sue it out of existence.

It's true that United receives a lot of customer complaints. But it is important to put those complaints in context, and recognise that United is not uniquely bad. For the past few years, independent rankings such as those compiled by Consumer Reports tell a mostly consistent story about the American airline industry. There are a few decent airlines, which also happen to be relatively small (Virgin, Southwest, JetBlue, Hawaiian and Alaskan). American, US Airways and United are interchangeably bad. Spirit Airlines is far-and-away the worst. But the legacy majors were rated mediocre-to-bad long before the current wave of mergers.

Mr Wu suggests that the Justice Department, or perhaps the Federal Trade Commission, should have blocked United's 2011 merger with Continental Airlines on pro-consumer grounds. He even compares the merger to several hospital mergers the FTC studied in the 2000s that resulted in "higher prices and more dead patients." It is not a fair comparison.

Without safety concerns, it is hard to argue that regulators should have blocked mergers of unprofitable players in a spectacularly unprofitable industry. The entire American airline industry, remember, has lost billions over the past few decades. Airlines are charging more and providing worse service not only because they can, but also because they must.

One way to ensure more competition on domestic routes would be for America to allow certain foreign airlines to operate more freely in the states (though this could put the domestic airlines back in bankruptcy and trigger a new round of merger requests). But in the meantime, the success of low-cost carriers suggests that for many Americans, price is by far the most important factor in choosing an airline. If American consumers really want better service, they must do what Mr Wu has done and refuse to fly on lower-quality airlines, even if they end up paying more.

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