Profile: dontregulateme
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What's Happening Now
July 4, 2010 1:15 am
Thank you for commenting. If you don’t mind sharing, what are you researching and to what purpose?
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Pauline, could you point me to a specific example of when a government regulation has stepped in to regulate and make industries more efficient, while offering lower costs and more options for consumers?
I’m quite interested to hear, as this is my focus in a lot of my research, and I have had much trouble finding examples.
I also think it should be noted that a lot of airlines do follow some of these rules on their own, and would most likely lose out on a lot of business without adopting such options. That being said, if I would like to travel on the cheap, realizing that it could come at a cost of worse customer service, in a lot of situations, I’d be willing to live with poorer service for lower prices.
With all of the other travel sites (i.e. Expedia, Orbitz, etc.) out there, I would imagine that if there was such a high demand for people to see full prices with bags and other fees, these sites would have created something to compensate for it. They would offer some sort of system where you could maybe “check off” boxes for what you want included, along with the options like dates/times, prefer nonstop, flexibility, etc. These sites would then offer the lowest fare based on your preferences per airline. However, since these sites aren’t providing those options, I would guess that in general, people either do their research, or don’t care enough about it.
I am a university student, and I’m not doing anything this summer, but I have done free market research for different papers and what not for school, and helped a professor with work on F.A. Hayek and Ayn Rand. So, nothing specifically about airlines, but markets and regulations in general, and most of what I have read (admittedly skewed toward laissez-faire policy) points to all evidence showing regulations being counter-productive.
This comment to me shows that we don’t need regulation. If people behave the way that Bernice does, choosing to no longer fly with an airline that does not provide adequate customer service, these customers “vote” with their money saying that this experience needs to be fixed, or else we will take our business elsewhere. It really is in the airlines’ best interests to serve customers well in order to retain customers and gain a good reputation to get more customers. In a competitive industry, being able to separate your company as being better than the rest gives you a huge advantage.