Home for the Holidays
My two daughters and I are among the 43 million travelers the Air Transport Association said would fly U.S. airlines over the holidays (9 percent less than year).
As our Midwest Airlines 717 taxied along a runway paved with frozen sludge at New York’s LaGuardia on the Saturday before Christmas, I watched an AirTran plane -- the company that tried unsuccessfully to take over Midwest earlier this year -- cross in front of us. We waited for an approaching aircraft to land and I peered through the haze of the still-departing storm to see what airline it was -- Delta, which is now absorbing Northwest Airlines.
Tumult is a constant -- perhaps the only constant -- in the airline industry. Even so, the differences between last Christmas and this one are dramatic. At check-in, I managed to dodge the $15 per bag fee one last time thanks to the fact that I booked these tickets on a sticky July day when I decided to lock in my holiday fares before soaring oil prices pushed them too high. That advance purchase meant I was exempt from the fee for the first checked bag that Midwest -- like other airlines -- subsequently instituted. My (usually dormant) Midwestern frugality and New York lust for the deal moved me to fill a third bag with ice skates just because I could do so for free. But I knew that when we returned to pick up my husband and fly Continental to Florida I’d finally have to fork over my first baggage fee.
Even though oil prices have plummeted recently, those baggage fees remain as the airline industry continues to deal with the repercussions of earlier sky-high fuel prices as well as the realization that they could well soar again. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the airlines collected $349.8 million in excess baggage fees in the third quarter of 2008, almost double the $178.2 million collected in the previous quarter.
Of course, airline mergers and oil prices were not really at the top of my mind as our flight took off. First and foremost for me was the anticipation. As I watched the aircraft in front of us take off, I thought of all the passengers on board. “Ah, one more planeload of people heading home for the holidays,” I thought to myself, looking forward to our own touchdown in Wisconsin in a few hours.
Although there are 43 million of us, there’s an intimacy to air travel during the holidays, in part because so many of us do it every year. It’s a high-stress travel period thanks to the high passenger volume, shrinking capacity and -- particularly this year -- volatile weather. At the same time, it has a warm and fuzzy aspect as well, because for many of us we’re headed back to a cozy cocoon of childhood memories.
Sixty percent of people who travel during the holidays strongly feel the time and money spent is a small price to pay to be with people they love, according to the Travel Industry Association (TIA). In a study conducted by Harris Interactive, the TIA also found that for many people it’s all about creating memories, maintaining traditions and building relationships.
That’s certainly the case with my family. And we’ve got a ritual of our own: After years of somewhat too thrilling cliffhangers, we now book only nonstop flights and rent a car for that final leg. One year we did the final leg by Greyhound bus in a blizzard, another year saw my husband working shoulder to shoulder with baggage handlers in the bowels of the luggage system in the Madison, Wis., airport to retrieve bags about to be loaded onto a plane that we were not going to be on.
Our trip home is now a planned intermodal experience. We fly into Milwaukee on Midwest Airlines. General Billy Mitchell Field usually seems to stay open -- my theory is that the storms that can shut down or mire O’Hare in delays frequently stop just short of Lake Michigan. We pick up our rental car, which has to be a fun car, something that Hertz makes easy to book with a reservation system that lets you reserve by make and model. This trip it’s a Ford Escape equipped with both Sirius satellite radio and NeverLost. We don’t really need NeverLost out of Milwaukee since I know the way, but we program it anyway as part of our family’s travel tradition.
Once we hit the road, we plug in an iPod we’ve loaded with our own holiday playlist, the soundtrack for our drive through America’s self-proclaimed dairy land. It’s a landscape still gratifyingly full of rolling, snow-covered fields, red barns with their accompanying silos, and the occasional country church spire poking into the storm clouds.
And as I point our car towards our family home for Christmas, I think again of how travel is often as much about emotional journeys as geographic ones. Travel is a business, and because of that it is often defined and categorized by numbers. During this sentimental season, however, the numbers I think of are all those people on all those planes going home to see their loved ones one more time.
As our Midwest Airlines 717 taxied along a runway paved with frozen sludge at New York’s LaGuardia on the Saturday before Christmas, I watched an AirTran plane -- the company that tried unsuccessfully to take over Midwest earlier this year -- cross in front of us. We waited for an approaching aircraft to land and I peered through the haze of the still-departing storm to see what airline it was -- Delta, which is now absorbing Northwest Airlines.
Tumult is a constant -- perhaps the only constant -- in the airline industry. Even so, the differences between last Christmas and this one are dramatic. At check-in, I managed to dodge the $15 per bag fee one last time thanks to the fact that I booked these tickets on a sticky July day when I decided to lock in my holiday fares before soaring oil prices pushed them too high. That advance purchase meant I was exempt from the fee for the first checked bag that Midwest -- like other airlines -- subsequently instituted. My (usually dormant) Midwestern frugality and New York lust for the deal moved me to fill a third bag with ice skates just because I could do so for free. But I knew that when we returned to pick up my husband and fly Continental to Florida I’d finally have to fork over my first baggage fee.
Even though oil prices have plummeted recently, those baggage fees remain as the airline industry continues to deal with the repercussions of earlier sky-high fuel prices as well as the realization that they could well soar again. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the airlines collected $349.8 million in excess baggage fees in the third quarter of 2008, almost double the $178.2 million collected in the previous quarter.
Of course, airline mergers and oil prices were not really at the top of my mind as our flight took off. First and foremost for me was the anticipation. As I watched the aircraft in front of us take off, I thought of all the passengers on board. “Ah, one more planeload of people heading home for the holidays,” I thought to myself, looking forward to our own touchdown in Wisconsin in a few hours.
Although there are 43 million of us, there’s an intimacy to air travel during the holidays, in part because so many of us do it every year. It’s a high-stress travel period thanks to the high passenger volume, shrinking capacity and -- particularly this year -- volatile weather. At the same time, it has a warm and fuzzy aspect as well, because for many of us we’re headed back to a cozy cocoon of childhood memories.
Sixty percent of people who travel during the holidays strongly feel the time and money spent is a small price to pay to be with people they love, according to the Travel Industry Association (TIA). In a study conducted by Harris Interactive, the TIA also found that for many people it’s all about creating memories, maintaining traditions and building relationships.
That’s certainly the case with my family. And we’ve got a ritual of our own: After years of somewhat too thrilling cliffhangers, we now book only nonstop flights and rent a car for that final leg. One year we did the final leg by Greyhound bus in a blizzard, another year saw my husband working shoulder to shoulder with baggage handlers in the bowels of the luggage system in the Madison, Wis., airport to retrieve bags about to be loaded onto a plane that we were not going to be on.
Our trip home is now a planned intermodal experience. We fly into Milwaukee on Midwest Airlines. General Billy Mitchell Field usually seems to stay open -- my theory is that the storms that can shut down or mire O’Hare in delays frequently stop just short of Lake Michigan. We pick up our rental car, which has to be a fun car, something that Hertz makes easy to book with a reservation system that lets you reserve by make and model. This trip it’s a Ford Escape equipped with both Sirius satellite radio and NeverLost. We don’t really need NeverLost out of Milwaukee since I know the way, but we program it anyway as part of our family’s travel tradition.
Once we hit the road, we plug in an iPod we’ve loaded with our own holiday playlist, the soundtrack for our drive through America’s self-proclaimed dairy land. It’s a landscape still gratifyingly full of rolling, snow-covered fields, red barns with their accompanying silos, and the occasional country church spire poking into the storm clouds.
And as I point our car towards our family home for Christmas, I think again of how travel is often as much about emotional journeys as geographic ones. Travel is a business, and because of that it is often defined and categorized by numbers. During this sentimental season, however, the numbers I think of are all those people on all those planes going home to see their loved ones one more time.