It’s a relatively mild winter day in Toronto, but the wind whipping across the tarmac at Pearson International Airport threatens to freeze exposed skin anyway. Beneath the upturned wing of a Hainan Airlines Boeing 787, just in from Beijing, ramp worker Ahmed Osoble appears oblivious to the cold as he unloads luggage from the plane’s cavernous belly, wearing an orange safety vest over his bulky parka and green ear protectors over his black toque. One-by-one, Osoble and another ramp worker guide U-shaped luggage canisters, or “cans,” onto a hydraulic platform so they can be lowered to a waiting train of luggage carts hitched to a tractor. They work quickly. “If this plane is even five minutes delayed, it causes a whole bunch of other headaches,” Osoble yells over the noise of whining jet engines before jumping in the driver’s seat and scooting away.
For most who arrive or depart from Canada’s busiest airport, that luggage cart is the only glimpse they’ll get of the vast apparatus built to handle the straining suitcases and lumpy gym bags they check in at the departure counter. As passengers shuffle through the bright, airy airplane terminal, ground workers like Osoble shepherd thousands of pieces of luggage into a dimly lit world of grubby conveyor belts, bulky scanning machines and pinball-like flippers that violently shove luggage in the direction of its final destination. The average suitcase takes just 8.5 minutes to wind its way through the 16-km maze of conveyor belts at Pearson’s Terminal 1, and less than one per cent of the tens of millions of bags moved every year in Canada end up lost.
Yet these days airlines are offering passengers a big reason to bypass all that purpose-built infrastructure. Last fall, Air Canada and WestJet followed Toronto’s Porter Airlines and most U.S. carriers by charging economy-class passengers on domestic flights $25 to check a single suitcase (a charge to check a second piece of luggage had already been in place for several years). The move amounted to a doubling-down on the industry’s new fee-based business model, which, at times, appears designed to make parts of the travel experience so uncomfortable that passengers will pay to avoid them. A term has even been coined to reflect what airlines are inflicting on their customers: calculated misery. Want to sit with your family? Pay extra for advance seat selection. Uncomfortable in your economy-class seat? Pay to upgrade to a larger one that was only squeezed in because your original seat was shrunk.
But nowhere has the strategy been as lucrative for airlines’ bottom lines as the decision to charge for checking bags. In addition to asking passengers to pay for a formerly free service, the new fees have helped spawn a whole new family of optional charges related to advance boarding privileges—all the better to beat the rush of passengers lugging swollen carry-on luggage into the cabin and tying up precious overhead bin space.
Of course, all of these new fees and strategies to separate passengers from their money come at a time when the airlines are already benefiting tremendously from falling oil prices. And they’re not planning on passing on the savings if they can help it. “Our plan is not to pass any of it on,” WestJet’s CEO Gregg Saretsky said during a recent conference call to discuss the airline’s record fourth-quarter profit, in 2014, of $90 million. Likewise Air Canada’s CEO Calin Rovinescu—on the heels of recording his airline’s best financial performance in 77 years, with $531 million in profit in 2014—told investors: “We’ll use whatever tools we have at our disposal to drive profitability.”
While the new business model appears to offer the salvation that cash-strapped airlines have been seeking for years—baggage and other fees contributed to nearly US$50 billion in so-called “ancillary” revenues globally in 2014—it also risks unleashing a whole other dimension of hurt down the road, as flying becomes more miserable and cumbersome. In particular, the carry-on crisis spawned by checked-bag fees has bogged down already snail-like boarding times, tied up security screening lines at airports and forced unwilling employees to play the role of reluctant bag police. Even aircraft manufacturers have been dragged into the mess as they rush to redesign their planes to accommodate extra carry-on cargo. Meanwhile, all those kilometres of airport conveyor belts—financed by airport improvement fees, and designed to get planes on their way as fast as possible—threaten to go underutilized. All of these things add hidden costs—both monetary and psychological—to the already trying experience of modern air travel. And, as always, it’s passengers who will ultimately pay the price.
For most who arrive or depart from Canada’s busiest airport, that luggage cart is the only glimpse they’ll get of the vast apparatus built to handle the straining suitcases and lumpy gym bags they check in at the departure counter. As passengers shuffle through the bright, airy airplane terminal, ground workers like Osoble shepherd thousands of pieces of luggage into a dimly lit world of grubby conveyor belts, bulky scanning machines and pinball-like flippers that violently shove luggage in the direction of its final destination. The average suitcase takes just 8.5 minutes to wind its way through the 16-km maze of conveyor belts at Pearson’s Terminal 1, and less than one per cent of the tens of millions of bags moved every year in Canada end up lost.Yet these days airlines are offering passengers a big reason to bypass all that purpose-built infrastructure. Last fall, Air Canada and WestJet followed Toronto’s Porter Airlines and most U.S. carriers by charging economy-class passengers on domestic flights $25 to check a single suitcase (a charge to check a second piece of luggage had already been in place for several years). The move amounted to a doubling-down on the industry’s new fee-based business model, which, at times, appears designed to make parts of the travel experience so uncomfortable that passengers will pay to avoid them. A term has even been coined to reflect what airlines are inflicting on their customers: calculated misery. Want to sit with your family? Pay extra for advance seat selection. Uncomfortable in your economy-class seat? Pay to upgrade to a larger one that was only squeezed in because your original seat was shrunk.
But nowhere has the strategy been as lucrative for airlines’ bottom lines as the decision to charge for checking bags. In addition to asking passengers to pay for a formerly free service, the new fees have helped spawn a whole new family of optional charges related to advance boarding privileges—all the better to beat the rush of passengers lugging swollen carry-on luggage into the cabin and tying up precious overhead bin space.
Of course, all of these new fees and strategies to separate passengers from their money come at a time when the airlines are already benefiting tremendously from falling oil prices. And they’re not planning on passing on the savings if they can help it. “Our plan is not to pass any of it on,” WestJet’s CEO Gregg Saretsky said during a recent conference call to discuss the airline’s record fourth-quarter profit, in 2014, of $90 million. Likewise Air Canada’s CEO Calin Rovinescu—on the heels of recording his airline’s best financial performance in 77 years, with $531 million in profit in 2014—told investors: “We’ll use whatever tools we have at our disposal to drive profitability.”
While the new business model appears to offer the salvation that cash-strapped airlines have been seeking for years—baggage and other fees contributed to nearly US$50 billion in so-called “ancillary” revenues globally in 2014—it also risks unleashing a whole other dimension of hurt down the road, as flying becomes more miserable and cumbersome. In particular, the carry-on crisis spawned by checked-bag fees has bogged down already snail-like boarding times, tied up security screening lines at airports and forced unwilling employees to play the role of reluctant bag police. Even aircraft manufacturers have been dragged into the mess as they rush to redesign their planes to accommodate extra carry-on cargo. Meanwhile, all those kilometres of airport conveyor belts—financed by airport improvement fees, and designed to get planes on their way as fast as possible—threaten to go underutilized. All of these things add hidden costs—both monetary and psychological—to the already trying experience of modern air travel. And, as always, it’s passengers who will ultimately pay the price.
by Chris Sorenson, Macleans | Read more:
Image: uncredited
