Article on the Freakonomics Blog about the increasing cost of air travel

Thanks lucky, I will keep in mind the advice to book longer connection times in mind. At the time, since she was going through HKG, I didn't think it would be a problem since she has connected at HKG in F on CX on award tickets several times before. But I didn't consider the delay at PVG... What about the new BP they handed her at HKG that was for SFO? Since her final destination was DTW, would you have tried to get CX to put her on the YYZ or JFK flights to avoid a transcon?

The padding of the flight times to 'hide' delays is an important issue, although you'd think that someone would have more definitive data about that and its effect on 'real' delays over time. The rest seems less systematic - surely there are more analyses of issues related to the network and real delays - average time delayed, etc - that would be useful to make the point. For instance, the USA today analysis is tantalizing but not very comprehensive. The MIT/George Mason article is truly awesome. It notes in 2007, average delay per passenger (with 74% of passengers at 0 with no significant delay) was 30 minutes; 3.4% of passengers were delayed 8 hours on average. So, you do have a very long tail - I'd love to see that number over time from 2000-2012.

@ anon -- I assume this was an award ticket? The best I can recommend is to always plan layovers as long as possible. On an award I'd do everything in my power to avoid an hour connection. And that's not just for the sake of making the connection, but also so your luggage makes the connection. In this case I would have probably booked her a longer connection, but there's not much else that could have been done. Airlines will do almost everything they can to rebook you on one of their partners, so assuming it was an award ticket I wouldn't expect them to rebook on a non-OneWorld/partner airline. If it were a paid first class fare where they can easily be rebooked in paid first on another airline, I'd say that's much more likely to happen.

I would think network reliability would be considered by travel professionals when booking or negotiating contracts for large companies. The average consumer may not be able to weigh all the non monetary costs of a particular itinerary, but are the professionals not considering things like airport delay rates, time and hassle of transferring at one airport vs another, on time rates of certain itineraries, etc?

A good article. Only this week. - as another UA mechanical caused a 7 hr flight delay to my wife, an expensive early morning taxi ride home, and lost productivity next day - we were talking a about how the airlines inflict economic losses on all the waiting passengers. The fragility in the system is increasing and becoming an unaccounted problem for the economy. Perhaps the silver lining is that it is a further encouragement to pick up web meeting approaches rather than risk the flight, but I still enjoy some of the travel.