I’ve been talking about how crappy airline service has become lately, and I just read this article from the Wharton School which I thought I’d share:

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine’s trip from Philadelphia to Dallas in May was an all-too-typical day in the sky.

After circling Dallas for an hour because of stormy weather, his flight was diverted to San Antonio where he spent several hours on the runway waiting for the storms in Dallas to clear and eating a bag of peanuts for lunch. He arrived in Dallas five hours late and missed most of his scheduled meetings, rescheduled his appointments for later in the day and succeeded in booking — actually overbooking, as it turned out — what he thought would be an evening flight back to Philadelphia. He had no choice but to fly home the next day after paying $400 for the only room available at the airport Park Hyatt.

Netessine is one of the thousands of airline passengers this summer who have been stranded on runways or sleeping in airports as a result of cancellations, chronic delays, maintenance problems and overbooking. While airline service is no longer the white-glove experience it once was, it has now gone beyond bad food and snappish flight attendants.

Today, when passengers board an airplane, they might well question whether there is a reasonable chance they will make it to their destination in the next few days.

Read the rest of the article here.

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