American Airlines continues its pioneering work in the area of cognitive behaviour therapy with the introduction of a new incentive to travel without cabin luggage. Those travelling with no luggage at all, not even the little shoulder bag to which we all resorted initially to avoid waiting at the baggage carousel for longer than we just spent flying across the Atlantic but now need just to circumvent extortionate checked baggage fees, now enjoy the dubious luxury of boarding first.
Ostensibly this innovation is meant to encourage travellers to check more luggage, paying the progressively higher rate per bag to participate in the lost luggage lottery that may result in having some of your own things to wear when you get where you’re going. But of course that’s not the real intention at all. The real intention is to change our cognitive evaluation of the carry-on so we start thinking of it as an extra, ancillary to the business of travel. Something for which eventually, naturally, we’ll be willing to pay.
Early boarding for those travelling with no more than they can fit under the seat accomplishes this nicely with the added advantage of dividing dissent — I don’t need to change my underwear every day, why should I have to pay for your compulsive hygiene habits? If you want your precious insulin so much you can rent it some space in the overhead compartment, sucker.
This is the evolution of air travel. There once was a time that a passenger on a flight was assumed to want to take something along and was allotted a little spot in the cargo hold. If you needed more space, you could pay for it and if you wanted to get out of the airport before your return flight boarded you could travel without luggage at all, just a little carry-on. Once we got used to that it was natural that those without checked luggage could pay less or, put another way, those with checked luggage would pay more. American Airlines is merely the first to apply this next logical step to cabin luggage. Soon enough the practise will be widely emulated and we’ll all be enured to the prospect of paying a fee to fly with anything more than the clothes on our back.
Nothing can stop this trend because it works and when it’s worked on cabin baggage it’s going to be applied to other travel perks that today we think of as being fundamental to the service. In time we’ll regard it as commonplace to pay a little extra if we want to be seated in proximity to our travel companion or children or if we aren’t willing to go on the standby list or are fussy about our destination. It seems inevitable that this practice will most certainly carry on.
