I’m Done Pretending This Is Normal
Let me be straight with you. I recently booked a flight, and by the time I finished adding what used to be considered basic necessities of air travel, my ticket price had nearly doubled. I’m not talking about upgrades. I’m not talking about luxury add-ons. I’m talking about a seat. A bag. The ability to sit next to my own family. These are not premium experiences. These are the bare minimum requirements of getting on an airplane and arriving somewhere, and airlines have somehow convinced an entire generation of travelers that paying extra for them is just the way things work now. It is not the way things work. It is a choice that airlines make every single quarter to extract more money from people who have very little leverage once they need to get somewhere.
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Let’s Talk About What You’re Actually Paying For Now
When I was growing up, buying a plane ticket meant buying a seat on a plane with your luggage. That was the deal. You showed up, you checked your bag, you sat down, they handed you a bag of pretzels, and everyone moved on with their lives. Nobody was charging you forty-five dollars to check a suitcase. Nobody was charging you thirty dollars to pick a seat that wasn’t a middle seat in the back row next to the bathroom. Nobody was charging you fifteen dollars for a carry-on bag that fits in the overhead bin. These things were included because they were part of the service of flying somewhere. Somewhere along the line, airlines decided that the ticket was just the entry point, and everything else was a monetization opportunity. And they dressed it up in language like “unbundling” and “consumer choice” as if they were doing us a favor by letting us pay separately for things we used to get automatically.
The Unbundling Scam Explained
Here is what unbundling actually means in practice. It means airlines get to advertise a low base fare that looks competitive, hook you into the booking process, and then slowly add back the cost of the actual travel experience one fee at a time until you’ve spent what a normal ticket used to cost or more. It’s a bait and switch dressed up in spreadsheet logic. The airlines will tell you that unbundling gives consumers choice and flexibility. What it actually gives airlines is the ability to hide the real cost of flying until you’re already emotionally committed to the trip and reluctant to start over. It’s not innovation. It’s manipulation with better branding. And the worst part is that it worked. We accepted it. We adapted. We started comparing base fares and calculating total costs and downloading apps that track fee structures, and somehow we normalized doing unpaid labor to understand the actual price of a product that used to just have a price.
Checked Bags Should Not Cost Fifty Dollars
I want to spend a specific moment on checked bag fees because they represent everything wrong with how airlines think about their customers. The first airline to introduce a checked bag fee was Spirit in 2007, and within a few years every major carrier had followed suit. They blamed fuel costs. They blamed operational expenses. They used every serious-sounding financial justification they could find. And then those same airlines reported record profits. The fuel prices came down. The operational efficiencies improved. The bag fees stayed. Because the fees were never really about covering costs. They were about finding a new revenue stream that passengers would absorb without walking away from flying entirely. United Airlines alone collected over a billion dollars in bag fees in a single year. American Airlines did the same. These are not struggling companies scraping together pennies to keep planes in the air. These are massive corporations that found a way to charge you more money for the same service and called it a business model.
Family Seating Is Where It Gets Personal
Nothing makes me angrier than the family seating racket. Airlines have a practice of deliberately scattering family members across different rows when they book basic economy tickets, and then offering to fix that problem for a fee. I need you to understand what is actually happening here. They are intentionally separating parents from their young children and then charging those parents money to sit next to their own kids on a commercial flight. The Department of Transportation has had to investigate this practice. Consumer advocacy groups have screamed about it for years. Airlines have made small cosmetic adjustments while largely keeping the fee structure intact. Because there is money in it. Because families will pay to not have their seven-year-old sitting alone in row thirty-four. It’s not a fee. It’s a hostage situation with a payment portal.
Loyalty Programs Are Not the Answer
Some people will tell me to just get a travel credit card or achieve elite status and most of these fees go away. And yes, that’s technically true. But think about what that argument actually concedes. It concedes that airlines have created a two-tier system where people who spend enormous amounts of money with them get treated like the rest of us used to get treated for free. The baseline experience has been so degraded that you now have to earn your way back to what used to be standard. That is not a loyalty reward. That is a cover charge to access the product you already bought.
We Need to Call This What It Is
This is corporate greed operating in an industry with limited competition and high switching costs. Most major American cities are dominated by one or two carriers. When Spirit charges for carry-ons and United charges for carry-ons and American charges for carry-ons, there is no competitive pressure to stop. They all do it, so none of them lose customers over it. That is how you know this was never about consumer choice or market efficiency. It was always about squeezing more revenue from people who need to travel and have nowhere else to go. I’m not asking airlines to lose money. I’m asking them to stop pretending that charging me fifty dollars to bring a suitcase on vacation is anything other than exactly what it looks like. We all see it. We’re all tired of it. And someone should say it out loud.