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Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance companies.
by nova22033 6y ago
Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance companies.
- azinman2 6y agoAs do many companies even small. Hell, lots of restaurants have poor customer service, let alone grocery stores, big box stores, etc. That’s hardly a unique characteristic to monopolies.
- perardi 6y agoHave you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It’s a stretch to imagine any gym has a monopoly, and yet…
- TwoBit 6y agoDon't you just cancel payment on your credit card and be done with it?
- jonny_eh 6y agoNo, business can continually put charges on it. You'd need to resort to chargebacks or litigation to stop it.
- perardi 6y agoBingo. In the past (and this was a while ago), you had to pay a cancellation surcharge, even if you were month to month, unless you found someone to take over your plan.
- coffeemaniac 6y agoThis is a specious comparison, and you need to consider both the consequences to you of a failure of the business as well as paths of recourse available to the consumer. Consider your comparison of google to a restaurant. Google can bring your entire business to a halt with no explanation, costing you potentially your livelihood. You may never get the opportunity to escalate to a point where a human will reconsider the matter. They do this as a matter of routine. A restaurant can bring you cold soup or something, and you can complain at a waiter right there on the spot (if you're so inclined). They'll probably give you a free meal for it. Absolute worst case they can give you food which is poisoned and there is strong precedent that in this case, if you escalate sufficiently, they will be shut down.
- awakeasleep 6y agoAirlines are actually heavily monopolized. However, it's the routes that are monopolized. So you appear have your choice of airlines, but if you want a direct flight and don't live in a hub, then you don't really. And, often when it seems like you have a choice, you're actually flown by people from a no-name contract airline that controls that route no matter which brand is on the plane.
- missedthecue 6y agoIf airlines are heavily monopolized it's never shown on their statement of financial position, like, ever.
- sova 6y agoInefficiency is often subsidized by the government due to lobbying under the guise of public convenience.
- prewett 6y agoA monopoly is not necessarily profitable. I have a monopoly on the distribution of my blog content, but that does not make any difference in my annual income. Assuming that the parent's assertion that airlines have a monopoly on the route from airport X to aiport Y is correct, it does not give them any pricing power in general because they do not have a monopoly on all routes from X to Y. There are multiple airlines providing routes from X to Y, hence price competition.
- missedthecue 6y agoThen all he is really saying is that two airplanes cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Everyone knows this. Infants know this. It's simple physics. When people talk about monopoly, they mean the absence of competition. They're talking about one firm having the control over the distribution of some kind of commodity, for instance, Standard Oil. But as you say, airlines have plenty of competition.
- ummonk 6y agoEhh... Plenty of airlines have great customer service.