Scheduled airline services fail to provide on-demand, secure, private, comfortable, direct point-to-point air transportation, hence an increasingly large number of corporate travellers and private individuals elect to use private jet aircraft operating to their own precise schedule and routing.
Less than 5% of the World’s airports are served by major airlines, and almost every journey involves flying through one or more airline hubs.
Airline passengers are no strangers to over-bookings and to repeated delays caused by late-incoming aircraft, missing passengers and the need to find and off-load baggage, late connecting passengers, lack of available stands, and by repeated slot, crewing and security problems. The constantly changing environment is inevitably impacting on quality and reliability, with scheduled airline services increasingly seen to be failing in their attempt to deliver an adequate and appropriate service to the regular business passenger.
Airline travel has changed significantly over the years, to many minds considerably for the worse. Scheduled flights are subject to increasing delays. Published schedules are stretched out so that trip times become longer to disguise such delays and limit liability. Jet airliners are flying much slower at more economical speeds. Aircraft take less fresh air through their cabins to save even more fuel. More baggage is reported lost or broken into. Check-in and security procedures take longer. Terminals, check-in areas, security zones and priority service lounges are ever more crowded and less appealing. Cabin crews are arguably less attentive. Meal quality is generally poorer, also now often accompanied by plastic cutlery. Cabins are becoming fuller and perhaps cleaned less often. These changes affect passengers in all cabins.
Meanwhile, airlines are increasingly being forced to follow aspects of the ‘low-cost’ model, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to survive in a cutthroat business and not least to meet shareholder expectations. There is undoubtedly pressure on many fronts, some of which impacts not just on service standards experienced by the passenger but in the view of many experts, ultimately on safety and reliability too.
With the added greatly increased threats to airport, airline and aircraft security of current times, together with the health issues surrounding self-protection in an enclosed and crowded space, now perhaps likely to get worse before getting better, scheduled airline travel is for many an experience to be missed.
The future of the private and corporate jet for those able to be selective is assured.