What would happen if air travel became expensive again?
Interested in working through this question on the back of various threads in R&N.
I'm wondering whom it would benefit, and who would really suffer if prices went right back up to unaffordable by a lot of people.
It seems that a lot of crew feel the travelling public expect rock bottom prices and then wonder why there isn't better regulation, a better guarantee of safety, and why there is perhaps? a company culture that allows certain character traits to slip through the net, as it were, because it's become all about cheap travel and far less about (standards? / whatever)
Forgive me for having very little background knowledge on this, but as SLF (very infrequent I should say) I would be far happier to pay a reasonable fare and know the crew were being treated well, happy in their employment, and so on.
People can now get to places they could never previously afford to visit for a paltry sum, yet the pilots that fly them there are forced to 'pay for their own uniform, food, type rating and accommodation', to quote from a recent thread.
This doesn't seem like a happy situation. And then we have the pollution, the ever more crowded skies, the objections to new runways (personally I'd pay extra to live under a flight path) and so on.
So what would happen if prices went sky high, as it were - traffic would reduce but could the industry still support itself? And what has driven the current situation?
All thoughts welcome.
Last edited by susier; 13th Apr 2015 at 15:10.
Reason: Clarity and sppelling