Will Airlines 'Un-ring' the Fee Bell?

July 16, 2008 — -- They say bad news comes in threes. For airlines, their employees and us passengers, the bad news seems to be coming in multiples of three.

Each scrap of bad news starts to take on a life of its own, feeding on itself in a complex chain reaction. It starts when an airline receives its un-hedged ExxonMobil credit card bill and ends with the latest frustrating fee of the week.

Along the way, beleaguered airline employees absorb more "furloughs," small cities lose air service, mid-size cities absorb higher ticket prices, frequent flyers pay for "free" tickets and our government stalemates while squabbling over whose fault it is.

Swirling around the eye of this hurricane of dire oil pricing news has been the inability of legacy airlines to recoup their newly bloated fuel bills solely through hiking airline ticket prices.

You see, we passengers aren't cargo … yet. Fedex and UPS simply tack on an additional charge based on the current price of fuel, but since their packages leave and arrive on time (with a money-back guarantee), we can grin (sort of) and bear that, just as we do at the pump.

The same cannot be said for airlines. Their product — getting passengers (with bags) from A to B — has deteriorated over the years as hundreds of thousands of new passengers were introduced to the wonders of air travel.

The reasons behind the deterioration of the air travel "product" are complex and can be laid at the feet of all in the air travel food chain: airline management and their employees, our government and, yes, even us, the passengers. But the point is not how we got here, but how we extricate ourselves from this mess.

I think it is pretty safe to assume that the American public will soon start holding policymakers' feet to the wood-burning fire and maybe — at least by late next year — fuel prices will have stabilized to something more reasonable (or, perhaps something we've simply gotten used to and can live with).

Certainly airlines are twisting the arms of politicians over the issue of fuel prices — and they're asking (well, begging) us to work them over, too. Many of you probably received what a colleague's mother called "a spam e-mail" from airline CEOs last week, which invited us to bombard our congressional representatives with more e-mail, asking them to curtail oil speculation.