Whom to blame: The Airways

Dear Jaygopal,

Yes, almost all airlines all over the world are scrambling for next cheapest producers of raw materials & spare parts except for a few stable european firms and the persion gulf airlines who gets unlimited financial support from their parent countries.  And these do place a big role in the air travel ticket price & services.

And yes there are airlines out there almost as cheap as of road travel as the majority of the costs of offset by their freighter & bulk item transportation price tags.  Now since we have quite a few private airlines entreprenuers in our land venturing out into this new frontier of air travel industry, it will take some time for them to move into other services. Marketing &  guaranteed services are the key in this sector.

The story of US air carriers attaching prices to check-in baggages are slightly over-exaggerated as it pertains to increase in prices of excessive luggage & reducing the weight of both check-ins & carry-on luggages.  Unfortunately, this was supported by local legislators since reports of fuel efficency was the hot topic between the public and governing bodies. 

All of us can agree that quality assurance of returns & compensations of lost  luggages are very poor.  This particular topic is not well discussed in our common communites as people do not understand this environment.  Have you ever seen the automated luggage carrier system under the Heathrow Terminals..its a different world... no wonder luggages gets lost. 

 But how about our manual luggage handlers?  Are all of them intelligent  & educated enough to understand the Airline Codes( prefixes) on the Tags?  I don't think so, as airlines & airport authorities will push towards the cheapest employee they could buy to do the job...this is in our culture and we support and promote it to the  next generation.  I have personnally witness handlers stubling and confused over international codes on my baggages in our various international hubs.

Bad service resulting into bad harrasment cases at the counter check-ins are always going to be there. Again this comes down to proper training and the person's logic of understanding the way our everchanging world works. There are hundreds of ways to convey a message over counter... and it takes only a few seconds of mis-prnouncements, misreading the fine lines or hand gestures to lead to bad customer/attendent service.  Again, here I have been involved, witnessed and know of quite a lot of my acquitances getting involved in such endless arguments with the counter check-ins.  And All of the time, the customer lose as time is of the essence. 

There is no such thing as a perfect price & service even if the pocket has an endless seam and infinte supply of service providers.  But in the end, in most, not all, cases, airlines have been accountable at the end of the tax year or thru a random revenue audit.  Thanks to the practice of "freedom of information" in most countries, average person & news media are keeping an eye out for excessive and abuse in pricing wars.  Recently( last year)British Airways was fined by US regulators ( over 100 mil) for a certain group of BA executives and other minor players were involved in over-price -fixing.  Dig into deeper, there are evidences of reports of other airlines almost every year being fined for such bad business practices.  These are due to a long list of consistent complaints with documented proofs from travelers of airlines abuse of customer confidence.

Back to our Kingfisher, Jert Airways, & other private enterprise of our Indian subcontinent; I will have to disagree that the fault lies with them completely BUT all other supporting manufacturing sectors, Us travelers,  those elected governing bodies and our culture's attitude towards greed being as an accepted trait in our lifestyle, does play a big part in providing such busineses opportunities in controling prices & services to their advantage.