Angry Traveler: Your fury is so fashionable

Mad as heck about that canceled flight? Your fury is so fashionable, according to a story in the November-December 2007 Utne Reader.

“Rage seems to be all the rage lately. Look around; it’s not difficult to conclude that the world is getting angrier and angrier,” Andrew Santella writes in this article, reprinted from Notre Dame magazine (summer 2007).

He cites our pique over politics, the body of books about how we blow up, our romance with a wrath that has created a cottage industry (never mind the movie “Anger Management,” starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler) on how to control ourselves.

In the end, he writes, the person we may be angriest at is not the jerk who let his cellphone ring in the movie or the e-mail flamers or the road pig who just cut you off in traffic. It’s actually just ourselves.

Or is it?

Are we angrier? Tell us what you think.

Consider … If you were flying Southwest Airlines from Orange County’s John Wayne airport (SNA) to Phoenix (PHX) in August, your flight would have been late 80% of the time — by an average of 32 minutes. That’s according to the Air Travel Consumer Report by the U.S. Department of Transportation. And that wasn’t the worst of it, either.

Southwest had a flight from Chicago’s Midway Airport to Omaha that was late 81% of the time — an average of 47 minutes.

Blood not boiling? OK, how about this: For every thousand passengers flying American Eagle in August, almost 14 of them had baggage troubles.

Still cool? How about this: In August, United flights were on time 66.2% of the time. I don’t know what the grading scale was when you were in school, but a 66.2% didn’t put you at the head of the class.

The point is that air service, for a variety of reasons — including many that airlines can’t control — doesn’t respect the customer’s time. The key words there are customer and time. Both are irreplaceable. Do the airlines understand that?

— Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times Travel Editor

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 3:29 pm by Catharine Hamm and is filed under Angry Traveler, Frequent Flier, News, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.