Five years ago we were stunned, shaking our
heads, straining to imagine what the future might hold.
We knew we would
never get back to "normal." The best we could hope for would be a
"new normal." And so we waited for it to arrive.
Five years later,
it's safe to say that we've gotten used to a new normal. We still
travel but we deal with long security lines at airports and
heightened security rules, even seemingly inane security rules,
that would have seemed preposterous a short time ago.
We travel despite
terrorist bombings, such as the attacks on Madrid's commuter trains
and London's Underground, or news of outrageous plots, such as the
one uncovered in the U.K. a month ago.
We take these as
signs that our industry and our travelers have grown more
resilient. In fact, we've heard it so often that the word is in
danger of becoming overused.
Maybe that's not
such a bad thing. We should be grateful that resilient is all that
we have become, that after continued exposure, we have not become
inured to the outrageous, hardened to the point of
indifference.
The thing to be
feared most in any "new normal" is that terrible deeds cease to
strike us 
as terrible and come to be
regarded as part of the background noise.
If resilience is
the midpoint between fragile and impervious, and if that's our new
normal, we've done well in the first five years.
Silence is
broken
Some of the airline industry's stuffed
shirts probably look down their noses at Ryanair even though the
low-fare airline is making history in Europe. It has done much to
take the mystique (and the expense) out of air travel, in a manner
seemingly calculated to annoy its thin-skinned critics. It has
attacked both its costs and its rivals with relentless hype,
high-visibility marketing stunts and bad jokes by its star
performer, CEO Michael O'Leary.
Believing in a free
market, we have forgiven Ryanair for all (or nearly all) of its
excesses to date.
However, we believe
the airline may have crossed over to the dark side by promising to
become the first carrier in Europe to offer in-flight cell phone
service.
We asked a panel of
a very few judges to rate this development on a three-point scale,
with one being "This is the work of the devil," two being "This is
the end of civilization as we know it" and three being "So what's
the big deal?"
Civilization
prevailed, but we received a small but alarming number of votes for
No. 3, suggesting that if this minority gets its way, we may be
doomed to suffer -- though not, apparently, in silence.
Shame on
Delta
In
this free country, with its open economy, airlines have the legal
right to treat their sales agents shabbily. We understand that.
What is difficult to understand is why they often seem to do it so
blithely.
On Friday, Sept. 1,
the eve of a holiday weekend, Delta told its agents that, effective
noon that day, it would impose a $3.50-per-segment fee on Amadeus
users.
Reasonable people
can disagree on a lot of things, including what the term
"reasonable notice" means, but we don't think three hours comes
anywhere close.
Small wonder
there's still a lot of bad blood between some airlines and some
agents. In fact, no wonder at all.