Originally Posted by
RustyC
If you're of a certain age then maybe you remember CBS/ABC/NBC or GM/Ford/Chrysler in the 1970s. In both those cases you had three companies dividing nearly the entire market and putting out a lot of bad product.
The heartening part of your analogy is that as arrogant and complacent as GM/Ford/Chrysler were in the '70s, by the early '80s they were begging for mercy as new Asian competitors flayed them alive. Barriers to entry in the airline business are likewise extremely but not impossibly high. And a prolonged recession that decimates business travel would do the same damage to the Big Three as better competition.
Originally Posted by RustyC
There's also the backdrop of an impossible number of unredeemed miles vs. available seats, but much of that was and is the airlines' fault, especially with all the non-flying miles minted.
Classic -- and stupid -- inflationary currency management. Miles increasingly look like post-Kaiser deutsche marks, hoarded by the wheelbarrow, but with utility too low to take seriously.
The more people realize how silly it is to save 400 or 600 miles at a time toward an aspirational award that costs half a million to a million miles today -- and who knows how much more tomorrow -- the more will say the hell with it.
Originally Posted by RustyC
You can bet the big airlines will use lobbying clout to try to tilt the playing field in their favor, but passengers pretty clearly see the pay-more/get-less trends.
The PR dispatches from Airlines for America in this era are a stone riot. "Customer Satisfaction with US Carriers Hit New Highs," etc. while Dr. Dao is beaten senseless, etc. The industry spins this fictional parallel cloud-castle narrative where air travel is delightful and customers are charmed.