Mercifully, summer travel season nears its end - msnbc.com

By Rob Lovitt, msnbc.com contributor

Is it just us or has this been the summer from you know where? The FAA shutdown. TSA agents gone wild. Fellow travelers flinging F-bombs, exposing themselves and urinating in inappropriate places.

It's enough to make an avid traveler cranky — "Hey, get off my plane!" — and long for the days when travel was an adventure and not an ordeal.

And that was before Hurricane Irene ripped across the Caribbean and barreled up the East Coast, leading to flooded roads and railroad tracks, the cancellation of more than 12,000 flights and hassles beyond counting for travelers.

Labor Day weekend signifies the unofficial end to summer travel season. Looking back, there's at least one encouraging takeaway from the summer of our discontent. If we survived the mishaps of the last few months, we can survive anything. To wit:

Congress fiddles, FAA and fliers burn
How acrimonious is the atmosphere in Washington, D.C.? Travelers got a taste of the bitterness on July 22 when Congress let the FAA's taxing and spending authority lapse while squabbling over government subsidies to small airports and other issues. As a result, airlines could no longer collect the 7.5-percent excise tax on domestic tickets, a $3.70 segment tax and the other fees that fund the agency's operations.

The upshot? A partial agency shutdown that led to furloughing of 4,000 FAA employees, the stalling of 250 airport construction projects and an estimated loss of $30 million per day. President Obama called the fiasco "another Washington-inflicted wound on America."

Adding salt to the wounds, most airlines opted not to pass the savings on to passengers, reaping a multimillion-dollar windfall along the way. (Laudable exceptions included Alaska, Hawaiian and Spirit.) "The airlines showed their true colors when they kept the FAA taxes for themselves instead of lowering their fares," said Charlie Leocha, director of the Consumer Travel Alliance.

TSA targets, well, everyone
They have met the enemy and, apparently, it's us. Even as TSA promises to implement more sophisticated, risk-based systems, the agency's frontline employees have been giving enhanced screenings to 62-year-old cancer survivors, 95-year-old leukemia sufferers and other likely threats to the commonwealth.

Such incidents only highlight the need to rethink the entire process, said Leocha: "They go through this whole explanation of how they have to do more advanced screening, psychological profiling, etc., and here they are focusing on diapers and Depends."

Cruisers get dinged for dining
For cruisers, the summer started with a whimper — or is that a wheeze? — as ships failed health inspections (Queen Mary 2) and suffered multiple norovirus outbreaks (Sea Princess). It ended with a bang as Hurricane Irene upended itineraries, pummeled ports and led to untold cases of mal de mer.

But what really got cruisers riled up was the industry's increasing infatuation with surcharges for enhanced dining options and once-free services. In July, Royal Caribbean upped the fee for its Chops Grille steakhouses from $25 to $30 and Norwegian began charging $3.95 for late-night room service deliveries. Effective Sept. 1, Celebrity will raise the fees at several restaurants, including the Lawn Club Grill (from $30 to $40) and Murano and Qsine (both from $35 to $40).

"It's one thing to charge more for a really unique experience but now they're just getting greedy," said Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor in chief of CruiseCritic.com. "More and more, it's like going to a hotel and getting dinged for every little thing."

Higher prices for hotel rooms
Found any rock-bottom deals on hotel rooms this summer? Yeah, us neither. The fact is, the hotel industry has been something of a leading economic indicator, recovering nicely as new construction has slowed, demand has rebounded and hoteliers have learned that extreme discounting during the recession did them little good.

The result has been a steady uptick in prices that pushed average daily rates at U.S. hotels to $101.80 during the week ending Aug. 20, an increase of 4.4 percent over last year, according to STR Global. Markets with the most breathtaking gains included San Francisco (up 14 percent), Miami (up 12.8 percent) and the island of Oahu (up 11.2 percent).

"The days of deep discounting are officially over," said Glenn Haussman, editor in chief of HotelInteractive.com. "Though hotel rooms actually cost less than at the peak of the market in 2007, the backdrop of a still weak economy makes it seem as if rooms are more expensive than in recent memory."

Uncivil seatmates 
Passengers reportedly beating up pilots, flinging F-bombs and getting so drunk they miss the toilet — actually the entire lavatory — when relieving themselves: It's not just travel providers that have made travel such an ordeal this summer; it's other travelers.

"People have this sense of entitlement," said Amy Alkon, author of "I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society" and blogger at AdviceGoddess.com. "They think they should get first-class treatment while paying coach prices."

For the worst offenders, Alkon offers a parting thought: "If it had been me, I would have been grounded until I was 45 and chained in my parents' basement with food lowered to me in a bucket until I showed I could behave in a civilized manner."

Here in the Overhead Bin, we second that emotion as we bid the summer of our discontent goodbye and hold out for a happier fall.

More from Overhead Bin

Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

02 Sep, 2011

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