Not That Anyone Reads This To Whom It Would Matter, But...

Dear U.S. Airways:

I am not a frequent flyer.

I used to be, when I was younger, but over the years, as security restrictions have gone from "mildly annoying" to "virtually impassable to someone with a metal plate in their leg who is unwilling to be x-rayed or groped," my travel habits have become less focused on air travel and more focused on alternative methods of transportation.

The cascading parade of fees your industry has, by and large, decided to use as a means of overcoming the need for an evolving business model have contributed as well; it wasn't that many years ago when I DIDN'T have to save money for months and make reservations a year in advance to ensure a successful vacation. (For anyone who didn't want to click, that's a fee hike for baggage in 2009, 2010, and 2011. And here's some more info, just for good measure.)

Honestly, the fees would be a mild annoyance if the level of service provided by the airline industry had risen along with the fees. Instead, you've cut back on meals on long flights; cut back on in-flight movies (which seems like it can't save THAT much money,) cut back on delivering luggage undamaged, cut back on allowable baggage; cut back on delivering luggage at all, cut back on seat size; cut back on travel privileges (and respect) for the disabled; cut back on airframe maintenance (which, frankly, is more worrying than any of the rest of it,) cut back on customer service...

But your airline in particular seems to have cut back on some things you really should have kept in service, if ever you had any; namely common sense and basic human decency.

Really, did a competitor leaving a particular market ACTUALLY justify a 600% increase in airfare?

You DO realize that if you're charging that high a price for a flight that is basically a puddlejump, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, you're merely encouraging other airlines to undercut you? If Southwest Airlines has any sense (and unlike your management team their team has given us some solid indicators that they do,) they'll wait a year or so, let you kill air traffic between those two cities entirely, and then announce direct service between Philly and Steeltown at their customary, affordable rates... Thus displacing you from that market, possibly (and hopefully,) for good.

But that's a sign of MINOR stupidity on your part; that could just be some neck-bearded jerk with a misplaced decimal point.

Failing to give a refund on airfare to a terminally ill cancer patient, and offering to "compensate" by giving vouchers for DISCOUNTS to her surviving family, is the kind of galactic stupidity I typically associate with, well...

...Actually, now that I think about it, I can't think of another example in recent memory of anyone being that kind of dense, insensitive, obtuse stupid; and I applaud you for it. I didn't even realize you HAD a Research and Development department, and here you've surprised me by releasing into the wild, with so little fanfare, the very finest, lab-quality dumb, assembled in secret from the parts of lesser dumb.

Let's see if I can reconstruct it.

You force anyone who flies on your airline to accept that their tickets are non-refundable without paying an exorbitant and also non-refundable fee, which you disguise by calling it "trip insurance." This allows you to "be generous" with customers by giving them "just in this case" refunds when something unfortunate happens, despite the fact that their choice is often to eat the cost of the tickets or lose the option of flying at all, especially in markets where you are the only carrier.

You have a cancer patient who was cleared, and understandably bought celebratory tickets for an overseas vacation with her family, only to find out that her cancer has returned and this time will likely kill her.

You decide, inexplicably, to hide behind the flimsy cover provided by your internal policy which has neither legal backing nor logic, and refuse to refund her tickets under any circumstances.

You follow this up by offering the insulting "compromise" of giving the family members who will shortly be grieving for their lost loved one "vouchers," the effect of which will be a slight discount the next time they try to travel.

Somewhere, in all this, you conveniently forget that these days we have the Internet, where millions around the world, including all three of my readers, can find out about this kind of idiocy almost immediately, and vote with their wallets far more effectively than ever possible before.

So, that's the situation.

You have a policy of not refunding tickets, based on your claim that filling the planes is hard enough to begin with that you can't afford to have people cancel. Despite this, you routinely overbook flights and have to bump people who paid fair and square, and whose schedules depend on your ability to keep YOUR end of that bargain, because there are no seats left and you decided they weren't important enough. (Oh, and while I'm at it, you lie about it.)

You force people to accept this policy, the same way that software makers force you to agree to their licenses; if they buy tickets at all, they are legally agreeing that you have the right to do this.

Great.

Maybe that will keep you from getting sued.

But here's the thing.

I know you did this. And I'm telling all my friends.

They'll have to make up their own minds.

But you know what's really cool?

I get to make up mine, too.

And it is, thanks for asking.

I will never set foot in one of your planes again, ever. Even if you decide to take a public pose of magnanimity, and refund her the money so as to stem the damage to your brand image, it is too late; your excuses are not convincing me.

You have lost, forever, any business I might have given you.

If one of your planes is the solitary mechanical means of getting to my intended destination, I will damn well hike.

Because if you value your customers so little that you're willing to not only refuse to help, but toss in additional insulting gestures at, a customer who is facing their own impending death and presumably has enough on their plate without your malicious screwing around, you don't deserve my money, and I will do absolutely everything I can to assist my friends in finding other means of transportation to absolutely anywhere they want to go.

I may be a single customer.

And you may find us personally and individually relatively meaningless.

But I hope you quickly reap the inevitable rewards of treating us, to our faces, as though we are meaningless to you and your business.

You act as though we're inconsequential, irrelevant to your business, which operates on some kind of divine mandate and exists as it does despite us, because it has some kind of right to exist?

Then you're welcome to test your theory by trying it without us.

Thank you for your time.