in the airport today i was looking around at the lines of miserable people and i thought to myself, ‘aren’t there ways in which airlines and airports could make the flying experience less miserable?’
it’s safe to say that 75% of the people who fly regularly don’t enjoy the experience. in any other business that would be a complete disaster. if 75% of the people who regularly went to starbucks, by way of comparison, didn’t enjoy the experience then starbucks would go out of business in about 1/8th of a second.
one of the problems is that airports seemingly have a monopoly on air travel. see, if you don’t like shopping at supermarket a then you can always choose supermarket b. this notion of choice is one of the things that drives our supposedly free-market competitive capitalist economy.
and in general it works pretty well, with places that offer bad service and bad products going out of business pretty quickly while the good companies tend to succeed. well, in general. but with airports, i mean if you’re in cleveland and you hate the cleveland airport you don’t really have any options apart from:
a-not travelling
b-finding a different airport which most likely would be pretty inconvenient.
so there’s not a lot of reason for airports to improve the quality of their service, for even if 75% of the people who travel through airports have miserable experiences they’re not going to go elsewhere. cos they can’t.
but the airlines…see an airport has 50 different airlines. and they compete with each other. so you’d think that the airlines would be knocking themselves out to be the best so that flyer a will choose airline a over airline b.
and sometimes the airlines are creative in the ways that they improve service(e-ticket kiosks, video on demand, etc).
but one thought that struck me today was: lines at check-in. we’ve all arrived at an airport and saw the 500 person line at check-in and wanted to either go home or start screaming.
here’s the big problem with lines at check-in:
a-airlines know when they’re going to have big lines.
how?
because they know how many people are flying.
at teany, for example, we know that we have more customers on saturdays than on tuesdays. so we have more staff on saturdays then tuesdays.
it would seem that airlines should be able to micro-manage their staffing requirements as they know how many customers they’re going to get on a given day.
and perhaps they could make the lines move faster by having check-in desks used only for check in, and having a desk for frequent flier inquiries, etc.
i waited in line for 20 minutes yesterday, for example, because the guy in front of me had 20 minutes of frequent flier questions for the check in person.
also, couldn’t airlines have ‘line stewards’ who are always there to answer people’s questions while in line? and couldn’t they offer magazines and coffee when the lines get long? and couldn’t they make the lines easy to understand and well defined? i mean, the airlines do this every day. you’d think that they would have their shit together much more than they actually seem to.
and one other thing regarding airports that also applies to lots of big, new buildings: acoustics.
i’ve never been to architecture school, but at architecture school do they teach the basic acoustic properties of different materials?
see, if you build a big space and use: marble, metal, and glass, well, you’re going to have an annoyingly loud big space that will feel jarring and disorienting. and most airports use marble, metal, and glass almost exclusively, and are thus annoying, jarring, and disorienting.
it’s a simple principle: hard materials reflect sound, soft materials absorb sound. so why not use more sound absorbing materials in airports and big public spaces to make them feel less annoying and disorienting?
ok, i’ll stop for now as we’re starting to descend into jfk.
-moby
