“Getting there is half the fun” is a longstanding slogan or mantra for the travel business. I believe it originated with an automobile company, but it was widely adopted throughout the business. And it’s broken.
Let’s start with the prototypical trip these days: Fly to a destination, have run there, fly home. If you’ve traveled at all lately you know that unless your destination was a complete fiasco, getting there was not half the fun. All the fun happened at the destination; getting there provided none of the fun and almost all the grief and hassle.
To start, airports are hostile—you stand in multiple lines then wait hours doing nothing. You crowd and push. You schlep heavy baggage around on its wheels. Then you stand in another line. Once you get on the plane, things do not improve. You are stuffed into a seat that was designed to accommodate Olga Korbut or Willie Shoemaker, not a modern-day American. Your airline nickel-and-dimes you for anything that might improve your flight. The program reverses when your flight lands and lets you off. More pushing and shoving for baggage in the overhead bin and for getting out of the plane. Then, there’s the hostile arrival airport.
The airline experience is universally acknowledged as unpleasant. “Enjoy your flight” is an empty send-off. In TV commercials, automobile companies are using airline cabins as an example of bad to compare with their good.
Can it be fixed? Probably not. Much of the crowding, line-ups, and pushing and shoving were thrust upon us by world events—initially relatively peaceful hijackings to Cuba, more recently deadly political suicide missions. Although some tech innovations might make things a bit easier, airport security screening will be with us indefinitely.
As to those tiny seats? Basically it’s your fault. You want low fares more than anything else, and low-fares mean tight seating. Congress has called on the FAA to set minimum standards, but you can bet that if it does, those standards will permit today’s tightest layouts.
The airlines tell us that avoiding the woes of “main cabin” travel is easy: Buy a ticket in a premium class; get into a lounge. But the math doesn’t work well: Premium economy, the next notch up, provides about 40 percent more room at about twice the fare—and 40 percent more of something for 100 percent more money is not an attractive value proposition in any marketplace Readers sometimes chastise me when my suggestions cost extra, but c’mon—that’s the way it works.
Just the opposite has happened with cruises: Getting there is now all the fun; in many cases, cruising takes the “there” out of many destinations. A couple I know just returned from cruising the Greek Islands. I asked if they liked that unique Greek retsina wine, and they replied they had no opportunity to taste it: Although they stopped at different islands, dinners were back on board, featuring the cruise line’s Norse cuisine. Folks, if you’ve made a stop somewhere supposedly in Greece but had lutefisk and Aquavit for dinner rather than grape leaves and retsina, you haven’t really been “there” to Greece. You’ve just had a very detailed travelog. Similarly, those many small destinations on many popular cruise circuits are mainly there just for the cruisers’, with no local authenticity. The cruiseship—a giant floating amusement and entertainment center—now provides almost all the fun.
Again, I see no fix. In my dim memory, I seem to recall that EasyCruise once tried a system allowing extended local stopovers on a fixed circuit. I see no indication of anything along those lines now.
Maybe it still works for road trips. I hope so.
