Airlines suffer from the same ailment that most large companies fall prey to – they seem to totally forget what the original purpose was for starting the business in the first place which is to actually provide a needed or desired product or service! The lust for profit and continued growth, along with the evil necessities of competition in a highly saturated market, all but choke out the core values and basic principles that drove the founders to build these companies through there own sweat and capital. In addition, this behavior blinds them from seeing the real root cause issues and keeps them on a continuous wheel of adding poorly conceived and executed “band aids” to address systemic and fundamental problems.

At best these companies are a total drag to deal with and the product or service is sub-standard and, at worst (as evidenced by Russ’s story), they are one small step removed from being a total scam!

And let’s not even talk about how insane it is that the price of a ticket for the very same flight can vary by as much as 200% over the course of several weeks! And why is it that I have to go through the same check-in, security, boarding, baggage processes to take a 70 minute flight to Boston as someone traveling 18 hours to India? Why not use smaller jets taking off and landing at smaller airports for the majority of domestic flights so as to simplify and expedite the travel experience – not to mention cutting the cost, hassle, and congestion by orders of magnitude!

And so on….

Yeah – they sure don’t get it!!!