Now we’re, conservatively, at a $1,600 cost to drive, which is a couple hundred more than the $1,400 we’d pay for plane tickets normally. The 7-year-old is prone to carsickness, and it’s hard to quantify the specific misery of being in a car with a periodically nauseated child for 16 hours, especially when you’re mostly on the interstate and it’s not a fun take-your-time scenic trip during which you can stop somewhere off the beaten path and take a selfie in front of the world’s largest ball of twine. You may not pay for these things literally, but you pay in sheer exhaustion and lost time. So instead I chose to pay through the nose for plane tickets and suck it up because it would be eight hours to reach our destination instead of 48, the 7-year-old wouldn’t vomit on anything and at least I could have a bloody mary on the plane as a salve for my frayed nerves, which I can’t do while driving on Interstate 85.
A lot of people have it far worse than we do on this front: more difficult itineraries, more kids, more constraints, less money to pay through the nose. Driving isn’t even a possibility for some people dealing with disabilities, lack of access to a car or other things that simply rule it out. And per our trip to Alabama, it’s not always less expensive. The first time I got on a plane was during my sophomore year of college, and the trip was precipitated by the fact that the 11-hour drive from Wetumpka to Durham, N.C., was going to be pricier to drive than to fly. I was a cash-strapped financial aid student, so I sucked it up.
In a sense, the benefits of airline deregulation have been undermined by its downsides. Low-cost carriers that made flying feasible for middle-class consumers emerged after Congress deregulated the industry in 1978. The lower ticket prices were offset by expanded markets but also allowed airlines to put in place new policies that eliminated amenities, and customers became accustomed to expecting less from air travel. But how low can consumer expectations go, and what does this mean if air travel becomes cost-prohibitive again?
We leave on Friday to go back to New York, and that means a flight with a connection and a long layover at a weird time, which saved me about $400 a ticket. As long as we can and as long as the 7-year-old has grandparents he needs to see, we will continue to do this every year — but not everyone will, or can, if airline service keeps degenerating while fluctuating in price. It’s simply not sustainable for a lot of nonbusiness customers, in terms of both experience and cost. The result is that air travel may become the exclusive domain of first-class passengers and business customers. When driving is out of the question, the alternative will be far inferior, if cheaper and less miserable: FaceTime.
Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers), a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.