Remember the last time you got a free meal on an airline? Or even a smile? I didn’t think so. Whats going on? Here’s a hint: it has to do with money…

Wall St. vs. the Airlines vs. the Passengers: Who is Going to Win?

Believe it or not, airline executives don’t wake up every morning and say, ”Gee, how can I anger our passengers today? How can I make them REALLY crazy?” But sometimes, it sure feels like it. Here’s just a smattering of some of the stories we’ve been following on FareCompare.com:

• Hell Flights: On a Continental Shannon-to-Newark flight last month, it wasn’t snakes on a plane; it was raw sewage, oozing out of broken toilets and down through the aisles
• Computer Glitches: United’s June snafu delayed or stranded an estimated quarter-million passengers; the airline called it ”human error”
• Tarmac Tedium: Seems almost every time you pick up a paper there’s a new horror story of people trapped for hours on hot, crowded planes going nowhere
• More to Come: New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey wrote, ”Now, I could (and God help me, might) spend the rest of this summer writing about delays, cancellations and airplanes packed with people stranded”

What’s going on??! Are we in some kind of Bizzaro World, where even if we DO wear shirts and shoes, we STILL don’t get service? Well, to be fair, some customers don’t deserve much service, like the guy who recently attacked a flight attendant over a delayed snack.

BOTTOM LINE: REVENUE

But the occasional whacko isn’t the issue: the death of customer service is real, and it all comes back to that oh-so-sacred bottom-line, and, Wall St. Here’s the deal:

• The Profits: Investors and airlines want to make more money
• The Squeeze: To make more money, airlines reduce capacity by squeezing more bodies onto planes they already have
• The Cuts: To make even more money, the airlines drop their frills (though it’s unclear if properly operating toilets are considered a ”frill” these days)
• The Overburdened: Flight attendants must look after far more passengers than they used to (”I never signed up for a 90% plus load factor; it makes it almost impossible to serve everyone timely in a timely manner.”)
• The Results: Less and less customer service, and more and more complaints

IS IT WORKING?

Well, the airlines wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t profitable. But consider this: In a recent customer satisfaction index published by the University of Michigan, most airlines ranked BELOW the Internal Revenue Service.

The sole exception? Southwest Airlines. And what does Wall St. want Southwest to do? You guessed it: Reduce capacity, don’t expand too quickly, and squeeze more passengers onto the planes they already have.

ARE PASSENGERS PART OF THE PROBLEM?

To an extent, you can blame the passengers. After all, what can we expect from an incredibly cheap flight? The moon? But at FareCompare.com, we think most passengers get it. They can deal with purchasing airline food, they can live with paying for curbside checking, they can endure a few delays. But why should a cheap flight mean 7-hours of sitting in a metal cylinder with no air-conditioning? And forget customer service, we’re talking basic human rights when it comes to excrement in the aisles.

It doesn’t happen often, that’s true. But should it happen at all? And when it does, is a voucher for a few hundred bucks going to erase the memory of the stench??

THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE GONE

Remember what it was like BEFORE deregulation? Prices were fixed, so the only way airlines could stand out WAS customer service. Remember talking about this?

• Which airline had the best food?
• Which flight attendants had the cutest uniforms?
• Who gave the kids the most entertaining toys?
• Who had the slickest looking stationery? [Well, this was before the age of the internet]

OR, ARE THEY GONE? HELLO, VIRGIN AMERICA!

That sly dog, Richard Branson, of balloons and billions fame, IS paying attention to customer service. In August, Virgin America takes to the skies, and the planes will feature seats with plugs for laptops, on-screen menus for ordering fresh food when you want it, and even mood lighting in the cabin (oh, Richard, you romantic!).

But for those of us who aren’t flying Virgin, what DO we do? Hope that all the YouTubers and bloggers with their graphic pictures and posts of terrible flights will somehow shame the airlines into apologies, at least until Paris Hilton does something loony again, and the media attention moves on?

FARECOMPARE IS ON YOUR SIDE

We at FareCompare.com are monitoring this situation. We care deeply about the issue of customer service and passengers rights. For the moment it seems, Wall St. believes customer service doesn’t pay. But, that may depend on the passengers: what are they willing to put up with for a really cheap flight?

What are YOU willing to endure?