Sitting in yet another late plane – this time thanks to the repeated incompetencies of Asiana – a company trying hard to drive me nuts after canceling another flight I was supposed to be on three days ago – I realized how bad things have gone in the airline business in a few years. My friends tell me I’m lucky because I travel a lot. And usually my answer to that is “you obviously say that because you don’t travel much”.
From a dream industry, for which almost every little boy wanted to work a few decades ago, it is now an uncomfortable, dehumanized, struggling and aging industry. Passengers are treated as “self loading cargo units” as industry insiders call them.
Asiana mechanical problem = 2 hours delay, missed connections, and a replacement plane not used since 1980 in bonus!?
Seems nobody is proud to work for an airline anymore. And how could you be proud? When processes have completely taken personal initiative out of the picture (anything you ask at a check in counter now results in “you have to ask someone else”). When you work with tools from the stone age that make every single little tweak a nightmare. When clients are treated like cows, and end up interacting with you only in case of problem. When the magical moments that used to be involved in air travel (bringing your kids to visit the cockpit, getting a surprise upgrade once in a while, drinking a glass of wine while 11km above the ground) have been removed for security or economic reasons.
“Food” at the Lufthansa business lounge. The dream life of frequent travelers.
The bottom line of this industry is to move people, and it certainly does that with a record efficiency and reliability. But how long can a company stay afloat when it treats its clients and workers like crap? Where should the balance between efficiency and humanity be established? Is this another one of these domains where market economy dictated an unbalanced consensus, like the one that just exploded on the financial markets?
One thing is sure: after this latest incident (part of a long list of flights canceled or delayed, of lost luggage, and even a spat with a drunk passenger on a Lufthansa flight that resulted in zero excuse or compensation from the company), it’s probably time for me to stop traveling a bit and focus on what is happening around my city. Globalization is making me sedentary after all, how ironic 
One of the inventors of the Web told me, back at the 20 years celebration we hosted at CERN in 2009, that “the Web gave a voice to a lot of socially challenged people”.
I am off to London to attend 
