Dear GOD, American airline companies suck

Okay, rant time (followed by some doom and gloom speculation...)

So, I've had a streak of bad luck with airlines lately. On my way back from Europe on US Airways (a Star Alliance airline), I was faced with a 3.5 hour delay in Philly (which started off as less than a 2 hour delay, then continually got delayed by 20 minute increments for the next 1.5 hours), my luggage ended up getting completely covered in olive oil from someone else's luggage (which wouldn't have happened if they had actually checked my baggage as priority baggage as they were supposed to, since I'm a Gold Member, but the lady at the check-in counter was on the phone the entire time we were checking in and missed it), etc etc.

Last Friday, I decided to reserve a ticket down to LA from San Francisco using a voucher I got from United (also Star Alliance). I did the entire transaction on the phone since their online system wouldn't allow me to use the voucher. At the end of the conversation, the ticketing person tells me that I then had 24 hours to get to SFO to hand in my voucher in person, otherwise the hold on my tickets would be released and I would lose them. There was no way for him to redeem my voucher via the phone. And this was at 10pm on Thursday - too late for me to take the morning off. I still managed to make it before the ticket counter closed and thought everything was fine.

And this evening at 9pm, less than 24 hours before my flight is supposed to leave, I get a message telling me that my flight is canceled, and that they have automatically put me on the next available flight - leaving at 10pm. Problem is that I had already made dinner plans and whatnot. I called up their customer service to make them do *something* about it. Their only other suggestion was to offer me a 2pm flight. And no matter how many times I told them that I have to work, they didn't seem to understand. *I* finally suggested allowing me to fly (at their cost) on a different airline (and they quickly claimed there were none available), after which point I suggested leaving from a different airport. That worked.

However, when I requested that my *return* flight *also* be changed to return to the same airport (since I would be leaving my car at the parking lot), they told me that I would have to pay a $100 change fee, since it is a "voluntary" change. I explained 4 times very slowly that it was not a voluntary change - I had made plans based on the fact that I was going to arrive in LA before 8pm, and could not change them. And since it would cost me $90 to take a taxi from SFO to San Jose airport to get my car (not to mention I had a late flight and it would mean I wouldn't get home until 1am on Monday morning), it was ridiculous for them to expect me to pay that out of pocket.

I requested to speak to a manager and was told that the manager would tell me the same thing. I asked again and again and told them that I was not going to get off the phone until someone helped me, she finally put me on hold and then changed my return flight for free.

The whole transaction took over an hour.

What the hell is up with this? And they wonder why American airline companies are having so much trouble making money?? It's because nobody expects them to actually live up to any of their promises and their customer service is crap. Which means nobody will pay anything more than bargain prices.

But that sort of brings me to my next question: what's going to happen to the airlines? I've read numerous articles that say American airline companies (except for Southwest) cannot actually turn a profit unless oil is <$80 a barrel (last time it was this cheap was apparently last summer.) Even Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, says that there will be tons of top airlines closing their doors in the next 12 months. What's going to happen if that comes to pass? That means significantly less business travel, significantly less tourist travel, etc. I don't even want to think about the economic consequences that this would have.

This just makes the fuel issue in the US even more frustrating. There are still people who refuse to accept the fact that we have to change our consumption habits. There are *very* reasonable alternatives to cars in the US; airplanes, not so much.