AirPain points

The gruesome stories of airline passengers keep sprouting more limbs. It’s a horror story franchise providing sequel after sequel with no end in sight.

Just like the lucrative movie industry that keeps churning out blockbuster moneymakers, milking viewers until the very drop is sucked from their marrow, it turns out that this business model is exactly what the airline industry has been following: Profiting from hapless customers trapped in their seats.

An online site, using its position as the foremost rumor mill in the country, just broadcast with relish the findings of a netizen that, based on its financial statements, Cebu Pacific makes billions from rebooking fees or cancelled flights.

Well, thanks for that. We Filipinos are suckered into buying cheap tickets, and then making vacation plans to correspond with those tickets, booking hotels and renting cars, and then boom. All those plans go out the porthole when the airline suddenly cancels. The choice, sometimes, is to rebook a more expensive ticket at the risk of losing all those funds already sunk into the trip. Or, just to be able to take advantage of a holiday leave already extracted from a begrudging employer.

Is it a business strategy then? To offer one-peso tickets that the airline has no intention of honoring, because the flight is going to get “canceled” for the often proffered excuse (repeated so often it’s become grating already) “operational reasons”.

And here we are getting fed the publicity blitz by the PR campaigns of the airlines about how the Pratt Whitney engines are suddenly going out of service faster and for longer periods, and hence scheduled flights are being compressed. Supposedly, these engine failures (should I use that word?) were unanticipated and therefore, the proximate cause of the delay.

Oh please, Cebu Pacific and PAL. Don’t you know, when you start paying these “journalists” for the fake buzz in their gossip columns masquerading as business news, that every sensible reader already knows that these rags have merely been fed these talking points? No strenuous investigative prowess employed in the making of the news there. And certainly no awards for independent journalism.

And oh please, Cebu Pacific and PAL. Like any industry dependent on machines, engines are carefully monitored and tracked. Or should be. Their life expectancies are known. Their servicing is planned years in advance. Replacement parts are budgeted way ahead and ordered from manufacturers with plenty of time to spare. And for us to swallow these preferred reasons that they are “unexpected” or “unforeseen” is to make us audiences that are truly dumb indeed, accepting of any story spun out in front of our silver screens.

If indeed those engines were “suddenly” needed to be serviced, it would have been simple customer service to start contacting passengers whose flights were going to be affected, and offering replacement flights. Plan B’s would be activated. Perhaps, by leasing temporary planes or twinning with partner airlines to augment capacity. Measures could have been taken the very minute that one, two, or even nine, aircraft were identified to be affected. Or at least, that’s what I would expect from competent management.

If effective countermeasures were taken, all the stress and the pain and the frustrations wouldn’t even need to be inflicted. Why wait until the passengers are already at the airport, or worse already waiting for their return flight back home, before telling them that “oops, no plane for you today!”?

And where is the empathy for those stuck? Why not shell out a bit of the billions to feed the passengers, or shelter them in airport hotels, or even charter special flights? Why not proactively offer options instead of waiting for complaints?

Such lousy service from a service industry player that has been “servicing” for decades. Come to think of, airlines are still on the receiving end of complaints after this long in existence, so maybe service isn’t one of their strong points. Perhaps, decades of dismissing passenger welfare and devaluing people have turned this customer abuse into a core incompetency. A distinctive feature already ingrained in the culture and ethos of the entire industry.

The lock this cartel has on local aviation has to be broken. New franchises have to be granted. Competition has to be allowed to drive not just prices down, but the players to be more efficient and, yes, caring. The agencies have to be stricter, including the Philippine Competition Commission (come on, PCC --aren’t these oligopolistic practices when customers are gouged for services, and then these services are rendered poorly, or don’t even get rendered?).

Enough is enough. The pain is real. And the money the airlines making despite their abject failures is also very, very real. So, are we just going to allow them to keep milking us?