Hot Topic: Travelers' Travails

Rockin' in a Fee World

Despite increasing add-on fees, overbooked flights and other aspects of today's airline travel, overall passenger satisfaction is actually on the rise, according to J.D. Powers' 2010 North American Airline Satisfaction Study.

The study, which surveyed 12,300 passengers who flew on a major North American airline between April 2009 and April 2010, found that customer satisfaction had increased notably, with service on 10 out of 12 airlines ranked higher than last year. Overall passenger satisfaction rose to a three-year high of 673 on a 1,000-point scale, 15 points higher than last year.

"The fact that overall satisfaction with airlines has improved is particularly notable in light of a difficult economic year, in which add-on fees have continued to proliferate and two major airlines have merged," says ...

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Travelers' Travails

Planners share their biggest gripes about time on the road

By MARIA LENHART


Every week it seems there's some story about an airplane trip that went horribly wrong. A plane is stuck on the tarmac for hours, its seats filled to the brim with crying babies and hot, thirsty passengers desperate to escape. A veteran flight attendant goes ballistic, curses at passengers and then makes a hasty exit down the emergency shoot.

Then there are the everyday annoyances that don't make the news. The mad scramble among boarding passengers—determined to not pay the checked baggage fee—jamming their bulging carry-ons into crowded overhead bins. The onboard charges for everything from pillows to peanuts. The cancelled and delayed flights, resulting in endless hours in the terminal. The airport security procedures that seem only to inconvenience the innocent masses rather than foil actual terrorists.

While usually not as fraught with frustration, the hotel portion of a trip can send blood pressure climbing as well. Unhelpful staff, $5 sodas in the minibar and irksome resort fees tacked onto the room bill are also part of what makes time on the road an ordeal.

Since meeting planners do a fair amount of business travel, as well as orchestrate it for others, Meetings Media wanted to find out what our readers are enduring when making the increasingly stressful journey from Point A to Point B. In a poll of a cross-section of our readers, 368 planners ranked their biggest gripes about airlines and hotels, while many also took time to comment (quite heatedly, at times) on their recent travel experiences.

Airline Gripes
When it comes to airline travel, planners most often cited fees for checked bags as their biggest annoyance (42 percent), followed by cancelled or delayed flights (29 percent) and overcrowded or overbooked flights (14 percent). In-flight service charges (3 percent) and airport security procedures (4 percent) were ranked quite a bit lower—although planners' comments indicate that these are not petty grievances either.

"In airline travel, those ALL annoy me," stated one planner. "What really annoys me are delayed flights due to all the carry-ons people bring because of the fees for checked ....

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