Why is air travel significantly more complicated than alternative forms of transportation? This is true not just for the actual duration of travel (I don’t think I have to say how uncomfortable airplanes are relative to, say, cars and trains), but the entire system, from booking to departing.

Airlines overbook their flights, which means that it’s possible that you could pay for a flight but not be able to fly.

Booking has always been difficult. In the past, travel agents would make money helping you find the right schedule amidst all the constraints. I remember when you could get a better deal on tickets if you got this special student card, but it all smelled like some kind of scheme since nobody at the airport verified that I actually had the card.

Now, web startups have taken up that role and booking is not as hard as it used to be but it still took me several hours to find a good way to fly form New York to London, stay there for a day, then fly home, then fly with my family to Italy, finally to fly my family back home, and fly myself back to London, and New York.

There are all sorts of booking codes, miles, elite points, brownie points, statuses, colors and precious metals associated with flying, unlike for other forms of transportation. Like, when you can redeem miles but if you only have gold status you will have to use up 60% more miles to fly during blackout dates. Blackout dates? Huh??

If you miss your train, you can still use the ticket later. The same is not true for flights.

There are all sorts of limitations regarding changing your flights or canceling them.

Airlines have all these funny luggage restrictions.

I’m violating the airline rules by writing this right now because apparently it’s unsafe to have electronics turned on when the plane is about to land (why, exactly, is that? Will my laptop cause interference with the plane’s electronics? Really? If that’s an actual risk then I don’t want to by flying!)

The food has become so bad, and so scarce — a snack for a seven hour flight?!

There are a couple of explanations. Either air travel is fundamentally a different kind of beast, a highly constrained problem, which requires it to be governed by highly complex rules. Or, air travel is the form of transportation that has seen the most corporate development (in the pursuit of profit) and the others like rail travel simply haven’t caught up yet. Or, it’s a relatively immature form of transportation and everyone’s running like chickens with their heads cut off.

It’s probably a little bit of each of these. The worst thing is that we all seem to have become numb to all this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 21:20 and is filed under The Daily Badness, for reflection, retrospective, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.