When it comes to the golden age of air travel, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’ | Canada Voices

This week, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines officially ended its long-standing open-seating model that gave passengers equal dibs on good seats, the latest in a lineup of shrinking free comforts and added fees among global carriers.

Over the past year, passengers have seen new carry-on bag fees, record-breaking numbers of labour disruptions, and global computer outages stranding passengers during peak travel times.

Waiting has become routine, with a three-hour delay four times more common than it was 30 years ago.

And that’s before even getting on the plane.

One Vogue columnist wrote last year about passengers being so pained by the presence of small children on flights that parents felt pressure to hand out gift bags. And then, there’s the leg-room squeeze.

To add dread to discomfort, a New York Times analysis in 2025 found that 91 per cent of air traffic control facilities in the U.S. were understaffed.

It’s against this backdrop that the U.S. Transportation Secretary recently launched the “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” campaign in an effort to restore “courtesy and class” to air travel, citing a 400-per-cent uptick in unruly – and sometimes violent – passenger incidents since 2019.

Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children? Saying please and thank you? These are just some of the questions Secretary Sean Duffy wants travellers to ask themselves.

But has the golden age of travel truly disappeared, or does it simply come at a higher price tag than we’ve become used to?

When people talk about the “golden age” of travel, many hark back to the white-glove service of the 1960s. For anyone still nostalgic for this vision, John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University, has some bad news.

“Flying for people used to be an adventure,” he said. “Today, they’re looking at it as something that they have to get through − it’s like a bus.”

And that, he said, is unlikely to change any time soon.

For much of aviation’s early history, starting in the 1940s, airlines were government-owned, subsidized and tightly regulated, Prof. Gradek said.

The trade-off was that airline fares were sky-high, even when adjusted for inflation. Flying was mostly a luxury, and people acted accordingly.

Deregulation starting in the 1970s in the U.S. – followed by Canada and Europe – flipped that model. Fares fell sharply but flying also became less of an occasion.

Airlines gained freedom to price as they wished, piling on the ancillary fees we see these days, Prof. Gradek said.

In Canada, limited competition made the squeeze worse while in Europe and the U.S., larger markets allowed airlines to segment customers more effectively into ultra-low-cost carriers like Ryanair, while legacy airlines focused on the premium stuff.

But many of the roots of today’s frustration are far more recent.

The COVID-19 pandemic left its mark on air travel, with new rules and mandates exposing divisions that marked “the start of the slippery slope,” said Prof. Gradek. Arguments over public-health rules spilled into altercations about children, carry-on baggage and personal space.

There was also a shift in how airlines made money. The pandemic revealed that many leisure travellers would pay for better seats, and airlines expanded premium offerings while unbundling what used to be “coach” into a base fare with as many add-ons as possible.

Today, average passengers no longer expect comfort or civility on a flight, said Prof. Gradek. “They expect stress, conflict and discomfort.”

Nostalgia-driven campaigns won’t bring back the so-called golden age of travel, because the financial and social realities of the industry have changed, he said. “The genie is out of the bottle.”

But as air travel seems to worsen, airlines are spending billions to improve the front-of-plane experience. And with travel for average passengers becoming increasingly chaotic, more will be eager to pay up.

Tell us about what you’ve encountered on a recent flight. Has air travel truly worsened? Or are you paying more to escape the chaos? Share your thoughts with mpostelnyak@globeandmail.com and I’ll round up some of your responses in a future newsletter.

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