Can airlines attract passengers again?

A refrain I’ve heard a lot these past six months is how great it’s been not to have to travel. People who were frequent fliers before the pandemic usually add that they now realise that, thanks to Zoom and its rivals, a lot of travel isn’t truly necessary anymore. Maybe some of it never was.
Yes, lawyers need to conduct trials in person — but it’s a waste of time and money to fly across the country for, say, a one-hour scheduling conference. Sales representatives might need to fly to a client’s location to close a deal, but simply checking in on existing ones can be done remotely. A company off-site meeting? Sure, gather the troops in one place. But a staff meeting? It is easier — and often more productive — to hold a video conference. Most consequences of the pandemic have been awful, but the drastic reduction in business travel especially has been a revelation.
Which is why I had to laugh when I read that United Airlines Holdings was eliminating the much-hated “change fee” — the $200 it charges customers who book flights and then need to change them. A number of other airlines, including Delta Air Lines and American Airlines followed suit. United vowed that it would not reinstate the fee once the virus has been conquered. Delta’s Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian said in a statement, “We want our customers to book and travel with peace of mind, knowing that we’ll continue evaluating our policies to maintain the high standard of flexibility they expect.”
And to think, it only took a 70% drop in business for the airline industry to get rid of a fee that customers absolutely loathed. The domestic industry generated $2.8 billion in fee revenue last year, according to Bloomberg News, a big chunk of which were change fees. That sounds like a lot until you realise that it amounts to 1.5% of the industry’s $190 billion in annual revenue.
In truth, change fees aren’t going to make much difference to the business traveller, nor is their elimination going to make air travel less painful for the rest of us. So let me suggest a few other customer-friendly moves airlines might make to revive the business:
More legroom. You want to know what really infuriates passengers? Spending an entire flight with one’s knees pushed up against the seat in front of them. The distance between seats is called “pitch,” and it has been shrinking since the early 1980s. The standard pitch was once a luxurious 36 inches; now on most of the legacy carriers it is 29 or 30 inches unless you pay extra for more comfortable seats. Creating more legroom would make customers quite happy, even if it did mean fewer seats on each plane.

—Bloomberg