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Nov. 3, 2016 – 9:45AM
Written by: David Koch
A Better Solution for Business Travel
Today, it is virtually impossible to make a one-day business trip on the airlines unless you want to get up at three in the morning, spend less than four hours at your destination and return home after the kids are in bed. And now it is almost impossible to reach mid-size and smaller cities without going through an airline hub with their inherent delays and uncertainties. There’s a reason why we call the folks that travel on the airlines regularly “road warriors”.
During my 22 years at United Airlines, I spent an inordinate amount of my time traveling on the airlines. If I wasn’t flying trips as a pilot, I was traveling via airline on other company business or jetting off to destinations around the world as a tourist. I experienced airline travel several days a week on average, both before and after deregulation. I can unequivocally state that for the most part I genuinely enjoyed airline travel from the 1960s through the late 1970s. However, once airline deregulation took effect in the early 1980s the airline-travel experience started to deteriorate rapidly.
One of the major causes of my, and many others’, disillusionment with airline travel was that shortly after deregulation, all of the major airlines exchanged their reliable, stable “network” route systems for the “hub-and-spoke” systems that characterize the industry today. With the old network systems, you could fly directly (non-stop) from most major and mid-size cities in the U.S. to the other cities in those networks without having to go through a hub airport. As the saying goes today, “You can’t go to Hell without making a connection in ATL.” And today, it’s getting increasingly difficult to get to and from mid-size cities from the hubs because the major airlines are cutting back on the flights that they purchase from the regional airlines for service between their hubs and those cities.
This is your chance to experience better air travel with the AirChicago Jet Card. We’re bringing back the one-day business trip.
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