Best Columns: Spoiled fliers, Relaxing retirees

With rising prices and declining service,

Don’t shoot the carrier

With rising prices and declining service, “anti-airline sentiment has grown white-hot,” says Patrick Smith in The Washington Post. The rising prices are bad enough, but the “unbundling” of airfares—“the parsing of fares into a la carte nuggets”—leaves passengers feeling “doubly victimized.” While “nobody enjoys paying more for less,” though, fliers should consider that they have been “a bit, well, spoiled” by unsustainably low prices. Airfares dropped 2.4 percent from 2000 to 2008, even as fuel costs rose 200 percent. Today’s ticket prices just don’t make sense at $150-a-barrel oil, and they will rise, and so will the public’s “howling.” But try to have a “sense of perspective” about it.

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