Airlines travel forecast to get heaps worse.

A squib in the New York Times business section (Passengers Scowl as Airlines Smile) demonstrates that air travel is bad, and is likely to get worse as airlines decide that it isn't really cost effective to care about the quality of their passengers' experiences.

How bad has it become? The Times says:

For the first five months of this year, the on-time arrival rate of the big airlines was 73.5 percent, the lowest in seven years. Complaints about service were up 49 percent from May 2006. This summer, flights are booked at average levels of about 90 percent, a historic high.

Notice the substantial deterioration since just last year. The money quote in the article:

But from the airlines’ perspective, “having a lot of rankled customers beats having a handful of happy ones,” wrote Tom Van Riper of Forbes.com.

I'm the kind of person who considers the best flight to be the cheapest, and a good flight to be one that gets me and my luggage to the destination. I make heavy use of internet price comparison web sites and generally choose the cheapest fare. While the exigencies of family life now require that I can't necessarily choose the cheapest time of year or day of the week (or even time of day, red-eyes being out of the question) I'm still an exemplar of the marketplace. I help drive prices lower.

Of course, at the same time I'm helping to drive down the quality of air travel, which hurts me and everyone else to some extent. Look at that 73% on-time figure. Coupled with the fact that most flights (especially the cheaper ones) now require a change of plane at the airline's hub, the chance of a missed connection is increased. And the high booking level makes it much harder to hop on another plane an hour later. The result? This spring on a family trip to Puerto Rico we missed a connection in Charlotte (the first time it's every happened to me) and weren't able to get another plane until the next morning -- delaying our arrival almost an entire day and cutting down our time on the island of Culebra from four to three days.

Unfortunately, in the perfect marketplace of the web, I don't see things improving anytime soon.