E-MAIL JOE    PRINT    2012 COLUMNS    ARCHIVES    SEARCH ARCHIVES

But, hey, it could be worse. You could be a business traveler trying to fly in Europe just now.

Thanks to a foul combination of strikes, airline failures, and a brutal winter that's made Rome snowier than Moscow and Paris colder than Oslo, European business travel has slowed to a crawl.

FlightStats.com reports that there were nearly 26,000 delays and about 3,400 flight cancellations last week in Europe. That's a greater number of cancellations than in North America and Asia combined. This week has been even more chaotic. There were more than 900 cancellations and almost 5,000 delays on Sunday and approximately the same amounts on Monday. Before noon along the U.S. East Coast on Tuesday, more than 600 flights were canceled and around 2,600 delayed.

"All of Europe wants to fly to Florida just now," one top executive of a major continental carrier told me via email Monday afternoon. "But I just canceled my Miami departure because the aircraft is stuck in the snow."

He may or may not have been joking—I didn't check the status of his Miami-bound flight—but his black humor is appropriate. The winter has been sad and brutal. Hundreds have died due to the extreme cold and the extraordinary snowfalls. But this will pass. And besides, winter is always lousy somewhere, and still business travelers soldier on.

But once the snow melts off the Spanish Steps and they get around to deicing the runways at London's airports, Europe's frosty aviation sector will still be in big trouble, and business travelers will have to scramble to adjust.

In the last few weeks, two European carriers have collapsed. Government-owned Malev of Hungary shut down last Friday when no white knight came forward to rescue the debt-laden carrier. Spanair, based in Barcelona, shut down the previous Friday after Qatar Airways walked away from a rescue deal. Air Berlin, Germany's second-largest airline and Europe's sixth-largest in terms of passengers carried, is still flying only because it did get a huge injection of capital from the Middle East when Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi purchased a 30 percent stake.

Then there are strikes mounted by airline workers facing contract givebacks and other concessions. A four-day work stoppage at Air France, due to last through Thursday evening, has grounded upwards of half of the airline's service this week. The Air France action follows strikes that have temporarily disrupted flights in Belgium, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Finnair and British Airways are still dealing with the fallout from recent battles with their cabin crews. Lufthansa wants concessions from its employees and has barely escaped strike action in the last year. Aer Lingus of Ireland is constantly at war with its unions, and, to be honest, no European carrier is totally at peace with its employees.

At least in the short term, the only solution to Europe's woes seems to be more industry consolidation. That's never particularly good for business travelers—inevitably, service declines and prices rise—and often isn't too good for the airlines either. Swissair, once called a "flying bank" by jealous competitors, collapsed in scandal in 2002 after snapping up all or parts of a dozen other European carriers.

Nearly 30 years ago, the charismatic chief executive of SAS, Jan Carlzon, said he was positioning the Scandinavian carrier to be "one of five" that he expected to dominate Europe. His prediction was early, not inaccurate.

In recent years, for example, Air France has eliminated all of its domestically bred competitors and created a holding company that also owns KLM, the Dutch airline, and a stake in Alitalia, the Italian flag carrier. British Airways and Iberia of Spain are now owned by the International Airlines Group, which is purchasing British Midland International, the second-largest carrier at Heathrow Airport, from Lufthansa. Even without BMI, Lufthansa of Germany is huge, controlling Swiss, the successor carrier to Swissair; Austrian Airlines; Air Dolomiti of Italy; and Brussels Airlines, a merger of the old Sabena and Virgin Express. Lufthansa also holds substantial stakes in airlines as diverse as Luxair, SunExpress of Turkey, Ukraine International, and even JetBlue Airways. And at the Southeastern edge of Europe, Turkish Airways is snapping up Balkan and Mediterranean carriers and has emerged as a potential buyer of both LOT and JAT.

One thing Carlzon didn't predict, though, was the rise of the so-called "discount" airlines that today largely dominate the intra-European skies. When Malev shut down last week, the first airlines to add flights at Budapest were Ryanair, the pugnacious Irish carrier, and Wizz Air, a homegrown Hungarian discounter that is now the largest in Central Europe. Along with EasyJet, based in Britain, carriers such as FlyBe, Meridiana, Norwegian, and Jet2 make the European discount sector more energetic and creative.

The problem with Europe's discounters? Their policies are often repugnant to business travelers. They charge separately for checked luggage, of course, but virtually everything else too: seat assignments, boarding positions and boarding passes, in-flight beverages, using your credit card to book a flight, using an airport ticket counter, and even for using their websites. It's not so much that buying and flying a European discounter is a matter of caveat emptor—Europe's legacy lines have adopted many of the discounters' policies—it's that there's no consistency. Business travelers, especially American business flyers, simply don't know the rules or how much breaking the rules will cost.

The Wild West mentality of intra-Europe travel is probably best reflected by Michael O'Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, who cleverly adopts a buffoonish persona in the media. He regularly trots out his claim that he'll soon begin charging passengers to use in-flight lavatories. Then he lambasts the Irish government for refusing to sell him its stake in Aer Lingus, which serves as Ireland's lifeline to North America, a destination O'Leary has been careful to avoid. He pulls his flights in a elaborately staged fit of pique whenever a local airport or regional government imposes fees or policies he dislikes. Then he riles up the media again by claiming he doesn't want to charge to use the loo after all, just remove two from his planes to accommodate another half-dozen seats.

Or as that noted airline analyst Will Shakespeare once said, welcome to the winter of Europe's discontent. And don't forget to hit the bathroom before boarding your next flight…just in case.

The Fine Print…
Spirit Airlines has added a $2 each way fee for "unintended consequences of DOT regulations." Spirit claims the charge covers the cost of Department of Transportation regulations that require airlines to hold reservations for 24 hours without charge and to advertise prices that include all taxes and airline-imposed fees. Of course, Spirit's $2 fee must be bundled into any fare it advertises or displays on its website, so the ploy is really a trumped-up way to raise roundtrip prices by $4.