Airline Follies Part 23

Today in our occasional series on things the American airline industry is doing to provide me with opportunities for sarcasm-based humor, we have the issue of small animal fees – those ticket surcharges that some airlines impose on passengers who want to bring their pets along with them as carry-on luggage. This has become a growing concern in recent years, both because customers are losing confidence in the ability of airline baggage services to actually deliver their checked bags (see my last Airline Follies post, “ Dude, Where’s My Dog” for more details) and also because people are treating their companion animals more and more like people every year, and are therefore reluctant to treat them as cargo. It’s only when the carry-on pet fee becomes more expensive than the owner’s ticket that I have to ask if the tail has started wagging the dog…

According to the story on the Fox News Travel page, some airlines (including Frontier and Southwest) have started charging $75 fees for carrying any small animal onto your flight, as opposed to the $150 they charge for shipping the same creatures as checked baggage. Since both airlines are discount carriers that occasionally feature tickets as low as $29, there’s a definite chance that it would cost more to bring your companion animal with you than it cost you to fly in the first place. So far, the larger carriers haven’t followed suit, but with most of the airlines now charging $25 to $75 for each checked bag, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t want to get in on high-return shenanigans like these. It’s also hard to believe that most of the people who travel this way would care…

Travelling with a companion animal (not a service animal; that’s a whole other set of complications) means committing yourself to staying only in hotels that will accept pets, only patronizing businesses that will accept pets, and only going to places that are pet-appropriate. Unless you’ve got a pet that doesn’t mind being left alone in a strange hotel room for hours at a time (or spending its days in your portable carrier) you’ve already planned your entire trip around taking your pet with you; it’s not likely that you’d balk at an extra $75 for each flight you’re going to be on, especially when you consider that checking the pet carrier as luggage would cost you at least twice as much. You’re probably also the sort of person who finds the idea of being without your companion animal for a week to be more difficult than giving up all destinations that are not pet-appropriate. But none of that changes the fact that you’re being charged extra for using space you’re already paying for under the seat in front of you…

Missing from this discussion, of course, is why having pets in the cabin costs the airline anything in the first place. Granted, if your companion animal is barking, yowling, clawing or otherwise disrupting the flight, the cabin crew might have to spend a few moments dealing with the situation and/or apologizing to other customers who have been annoyed by you and your pet, but those employees are already being paid for that time. If your pet gets loose it might conceivably cost the airline something to remove various pet “accidents” from the interior of the plane, but it’s hard to imagine that requiring $75 worth of time or chemicals, either. For the moment, it would appear that this is just another way for the airlines to squeeze a little more money out of their passengers by charging money for something that has traditionally been free…

I don’t know about anyone else, but it makes me wonder what they’ll come up with next. Stay tuned, folks…