Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
27.07.2023 - 18:29 / smartertravel.com / Tim Winship
While there’s been no shortage of reports of hours-long lines to clear TSA security checkpoints, there has yet to be a full accounting of the harm caused by the system’s breakdown.
How many hours have been wasted? How many travelers have missed their flights? How many flights have been delayed? How much unnecessary stress has been endured? Some of those questions will remain forever unanswered. But today we are closer to achieving clarity on at least one measure of the debacle’s damage to date.
Related:Heads Roll, but No End in Sight to the TSA MessIn a Thursday morning Tweet, David Koenig, airline reporter for the Associated Press, quotes Kerry Philipovitch, American’s senior vice president of customer experience, thusly: “Year-to-date, more than 70,000 American Airlines customers have missed flights due to excessive wait times.”
Philipovitch was testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation Security. In the same statement, she went on to charge that TSA screening lapses resulted in more than 40,000 checked bags’ being delayed so far this year.
So, 70,000 American passengers missed their flights. Let’s assume the numbers for Delta, Southwest, and United are roughly comparable, perhaps a bit lower. That generates a conservative estimate of 250,000 missed flights for the Big 4 carriers alone.
And, again extrapolating from American’s numbers, around 150,000 checked bags missed their flights on the four largest U.S. carriers.
Big numbers, big problem. In Philipovitch’s words: “To say customers are agitated is putting it mildly, and the public outcry has resonated.”
Putting it mildly, indeed.
Reader Reality Check
How do you plan to avoid this summer’s security bottlenecks?
More from SmarterTravel: Is Airbnb Killing the Hotel Business? Get 1,000 United Miles, Quickly Will Suspending Bag Fees Lead to Shorter Security Lines?After 20 years working in the travel industry, and 15 years writing about it, Tim Winship knows a thing or two about travel. Follow him on Twitter @twinship.
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Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
With no sign of relief in sight, the TSA’s inability to effectively and efficiently manage airport security screening promises to remain this summer’s biggest bad-news travel story.
When Muslim Advocates and the NAACP issue a joint letter accusing the U.S. airline industry of racism, it’s big news. And when the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization,” follows that up with an advisory specifically questioning the racial policies of the nation’s largest airline, American, it’s nothing less than a media firestorm. Indeed, all the major news media covered the story exhaustively. And “American Airlines” has been a trending Twitter topic for several days.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
There’s a storm brewing in the rarefied air occupied by the priciest of the travel-rewards cards.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
Could Spirit, the airline everybody loves to hate, become a bit less hateful? If the company’s new CEO has his way, it will do just that.
In its latest effort to capture the hearts, minds, and expense accounts of the travel universe’s most privileged 1 percent, American is raising the bar for airport lounges.
Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.