November 20, 2009 - "Holiday Air Travel Is No Bag of Peanuts" by Stephen Enzweiler

Holiday Air Travel Is No Bag of Peanuts
(Traveling by air this Thanksgiving holiday? Goooood luck.)

By Stephen Enzweiler

Posted: November 20, 2009

The holiday season is once more upon us, and that means the travel season is, too.

It is the beginning of an annual migration of the American species heretofore unseen in its size and scope on planet Earth. It is a phenomenon no anthropologist with any number of doctoral degrees can quite explain because the phenomenon itself defies natural law. It is earmarked by the frenzied compulsion to travel...somewhere, anywhere...to get away from home. People do it in the millions...jump on an airliner, get in a car, or hop on a bus or train. They just GO.

Welcome to the Thanksgiving holiday travel season!

By next Thursday, nearly 38 million Americans will travel for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. By the following Sunday, the same 38 million will travel back to where they began. That's 76 million people (roughly one quarter of the population) coming and going on planes, trains, and in automobiles.

More than 3 million will travel by car, 2.5 million will travel by air, and 3 million by train or bus. That is a bigger movement of people across the landscape than was any migration of any herd of any kind of animal that ever lived on planet Earth. And we do it all in just one day!!

While every mode of migration generates its own stress, it is traveling by air that creates the most angst in travelers. They will spend three days packing and a day to travel to witness Uncle Ian once again lose his dentures in the cranberry sauce or Aunt Ida blow up the turkey because she forgot to take out the sealed plastic packet that contains the neck and gizzards. We go, it seems, because we have always gone. Holiday air travel has become a tradition almost as sacrosanct as the holiday itself.

But according to AAA, Thanksgiving holiday air travel has dropped by 62% since 2000! This is largely due to all the security hassles, airline cutbacks and bankruptcies, route cancellations, fare hikes, baggage charges, holiday fare surcharges, paying for meals, not to mention charging a fee just to go to the bathroom. (It's a sad day in a free nation when you have to pay to pee.) Those are just the reasons we can document. Maybe a recent trip I took might better explain why people are getting so turned off by airline travel.

It was a trip I took to Alaska recently to visit my brother. Flying on a Northwest Airlines 757 became one of the worst travel experiences in my life. I spent five hours wedged in a hard, uncomfortable seat that was so close to the one in front of it I couldn’t bring my knees together. I was finally forced to extend both my feet out into the aisle alongside the seat in front of me. As if on cue, a Nazi flight attendant came up to me, pointed at my feet, and ordered me to get them out of the aisle. I explained I had to relieve leg cramps, but she didn't care. She pointed at my feet again and ordered me a second time to get them out of the aisle...or else. Or else what? Put me in a camp?

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my fold down tray was in my chest, the in-flight movie was another repeat of nouveau vomit, and I was tossed at no charge a small foil bag containing just ten peanuts. I had to pay $3 for a Pepsi and $8 for one of those tiny bottles of whiskey I hoped would take the edge off my sore back, my even sorer rear end, my cramping legs, and my rapidly deteriorating attitude.

If I’d had a cowbell around my neck, I’d have rung it and mooed just to aggravate the flight attendant who wouldn’t let me stretch out. In the end, all I got for my $670 fare was an exhausting 17-hour travel day with 3-layovers... and a tiny foil bag containing just ten peanuts. I hate being treated like a cash crop.

It is no wonder then that holiday air travel is down. It has been declining for several years and is continuing to decline. The airline industry is rapidly becoming a dodo bird in its own right. And it’s their own fault. The usually spendthrift American pocketbook has begun to snap shut and turn its back on the industry it sustained for the last two decades. Of course, the airlines are just trying to survive. We all understand that.

But even a starving dog is smart enough to know it doesn't bite the hand that feeds it. Apparently the airline industry executives haven't learned that lesson yet. One gentleman I know told me recently he'd build a reed raft and float to Europe before he flies on another airline.

Nonetheless, people will always fly, and there will always be airlines to take us across the sea or to far away places. This Thanksgiving holiday notwithstanding, the airlines can count on the 2.5 million people who will still travel, no matter how much it hurts their pocketbook. That's a lot of bags of peanuts to hand out.

Me? This Thanksgiving, I'm staying home. No flying, no driving, no traveling for me. Our family is going to celebrate Thanksgiving in our own house with our own family and the traditions handed down by the generations who went before us. We will also await those first scant flurries that they say are in the forecast for Thursday.

I’m going to build a fire in the fireplace like my dad did, drink some good wine and help my wife cook the holiday feast and remember the many Thanksgivings past and the people who made them special. I’ll make the pumpkin pie again with the crust from scratch that my mamma used to make, and I’ll make her special cranberry sauce recipe which she got from her mother. We will light the candles in the fading light and I will carve the turkey and make the toast. And as the light of day fades into evening, we’ll sit and watch the fire fade away as the quiet night settles in around us.

And I’m going to pray. I'm going to thank the good Lord for the food, the friends, and my family. Then I’m going to thank him that I don’t have to fly on any airline this holiday.

Posted: 20 November 2009
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Stephen Enzweiler is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the acclaimed Oxford In The Civil War, available whever books are sold.

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