If there was one nugget of truth to emerge from this week's meeting of the Utah Air Travel Commission, it was this: despite the UATC's contracting for expensive independent studies of Utah air fares, the belief that the airlines are gouging Utah air travelers on ticket prices will not go away.
The issue of air fares has come to dominate the monthly meetings of the commission, a group of citizen appointees charged with improving Utah's air service. Other agenda items seem merely a prelude to the real meat of the monthly meetings: debate - sometimes heated - over soaring ticket prices and how much Delta Air Lines is to blame for them by taking advantage of its dominance (nearly 80 percent of all flights) of the local market.Only the issue of smoking on commercial airline flights has come close to generating as much controversy as escalating air fares.
Wednesday's meeting was no exception as debate flared between Commissioner Robert Springmeyer and Fred Rollins, Delta's Salt Lake District marketing manager. The issue, called "hidden ticketing," was this: Some Delta passengers who want to fly from Los Angeles or other West Coast cities to Salt Lake City have been booking flights to Phoenix that have a stopover in Salt Lake.
When the plane makes that stop in Salt Lake. they simply get off the plane and let it go on to Phoenix without them. Their motive? Flights to the highly competitive Phoenix market are priced much lower than flights to Salt Lake. Is there a problem, either moral or legal, with passengers taking advantage of this loophole?
To Rollins there is. He claims that such passengers are preventing those who really do need to get to Phoenix from occupying the seat. Rollins contends such ploys are unethical and that Delta could take sanctions against anyone caught doing it, including canceling their return reservations and "disciplining" their travel agent.
Not so fast, said Springmeyer. Such a passenger simply buys a seat to a destination and then chooses not to occupy it all the way. "Is that any different than someone making the decision to take the pickles off his hamburger?" Springmeyer asked, rhetorically. The problem, he said, is one of unfair pricing that discriminates against Utah travelers in favor of Arizona travelers.
Other commissioners agreed and questioned the legality, not to mention practicality, of Delta attempting to punish passengers who fail to reboard at a stopover city. For one thing, those tickets are usually bought one-way so there could be no cancelling of returns. For another, such an action could be a public relations disaster for an airline attempting it.
The exchange between Springmeyer and Rollins was cut off by UATC Chairman Yan M. Ross who said he didn't want things "said in haste and repented in leisure" and that it was his desire to keep emotion out of discussions on airfares.
Taken out of context, the argument seems specious, even silly, but it is indicative of the anger and frustration felt by air travelers forced to pay fares to popular destinations that are many times higher than they were before Delta merged with Western Air Lines and formed a "hub" operation here.
And it reflects the frustration felt by Rollins and other Delta representatives who say they are merely following the dictates of the free market and, in any case, should be praised for the massive investment they have made in Utah's economy, not censured for the fact that fares are rising nationwide, not just in Utah.
Springmeyer, who is chairman of the commission's task force on airfares, said the latest update of the ongoing Utah fares study by Washington D.C.-based airline consultants Kurth & Co., indicates that airfares are up 31.4 percent in Utah compared to only 22.4 percent for other airline hub cities and 22.9 percent for the industry as a whole - clear evidence that Utah is not simply part of a national trend.
The Kurth report also found that competing airlines had actually raised their fares at a higher percentage rate than Delta, leading Springmeyer to conclude that they were simply following Delta's lead and matching its fare structure.
Rollins disputed this conclusion, saying Delta "does not lead the way" in fare increases. Rather, he said, those airlines "have simply found it necessary to raise fares because of increasing costs of doing business."
Whatever the true answer, it is clear that the debate over the high cost of flying in the '80s is not going to go away in the '90s.