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Times Travel editor Catharine Hamm says travelers have cause for complaint. As airlines have trimmed their budgets, they've cut back on service as well. Times staff writer and editor Thomas Curwen argues that the sense of self-entitlement felt by today's travelers has turned them into a bunch of whiners.

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Catharine Hamm:

Go ahead. Ask a plane full of commercial airline passengers how many like to fly. How many hands do you see waving overhead?

These days, it's apt to be a big round number, and that number is zero.

Nothing, many airline passengers say, is as abhorrent about travel these days as flying. Ask passengers whose luggage has been mishandled; there are more of them. Ask passengers whose flights continually land way behind schedule; there are scores of them too.

In fact, ask just about any passenger, and you'll hear tales of woe so pitiful that a recent survey showed the airlines are more despised than the Internal Revenue Service.

Can it get much worse than that? Yes. And it's just about to.

Welcome to the summer of our discontent — when an increasingly surly public meets an incredibly stressed system. Fasten your seat belts, friends. Bumpy doesn't begin to describe it.

Continue reading Hamm's argument: "Airlines giving passengers cause for complaint"

Thomas Curwen:

Psychologists might attribute the rising levels of our anger to a convergence of powerlessness and entitledness that have pervaded modern life. We witness rage on a daily basis whether it's in traffic, in politics or our daily entertainments, and we live with the illusion that we can avoid or even master moments of such intemperance.

"I think it's more than possible that we are growing more angry these days as we grow more spoiled, more used to having our own way, more masters of our own tiny domain," says traveler and writer Pico Iyer. "Cyberspace, in fact, tempts us to live ever farther from the world at large and ever more within our own ideas and niche interests and selected friends. In that regard, going out into the world, where things can't be controlled, may be a greater shock than ever."

Travel has always been about pitfalls, risks and broken carriages. The word alone derives from the word travail. At one time, we knew this.

Continue reading Curwen's argument: "Traveling to a time when we didn't whine"

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