Please Upgrade the Standby List

Posted by: Justin Bachman on May 26

I had an up-close-and-personal view of the standby list on Memorial Day, entangled at Washington’s Dulles Airport after a missed connecting flight. I made it home from Europe the same day I had expected, fortunately. Unfortunately, scurrying gate-to-gate attempting to secure a seat illustrated what a grueling experience this can be for business travelers.

Given all the capital IT investment in recent years on nifty new systems that can track bags to the end of the earth and predict with reasonable accuracy when and by how much a connecting flight will be delayed, it appeared to my observations that the standby system remains a bit retro. These lists are crucial to airline travel, especially for road warriors, given the amount of flying regional airlines now do on smaller jets, and the airlines’ penchant for overselling many flights. (The government tracks oversold seats in terms of the number of passengers bumped involuntarily.) In my experience, the most nettlesome problem is that you cannot be on more than one standby list at a time. This can be a problem.

Let’s say you are heading to an area with multiple airports: New York, LA, Washington, Miami, etc. You’ve got a critical meeting tomorrow in Los Angeles – you don’t really care if you’re flying to LAX or Orange County, given the time constraint and the necessity of being there. This means you ask to be added to the list for the first flight departing to the area and, when you don’t get on that one, queue up to be added to the next flight, and then the next, and then the next. In my experience, airlines tend to focus on your original destination. If you bought the flight to San Francisco, they (or at least their computers) don’t naturally consider Oakland and will roll you merrily to subsequent SFO flights. This means you have to raise Oakland’s standby list with the airline.

Why isn’t technology a better solution by now? A more comprehensive, technically astute system would recognize the traveler’s current location and destination airport and would fluidly move him from one list to another until a confirmed seat was secured, sending an email or SMS text at each stage with gate location and times. You could even set the parameters on airports at a given location: Reagan National and Baltimore, but not Dulles, for your options. This system would also instantly and impartially weigh the other factors important to an airline when the quiet seat lottery commences, such as the traveler’s frequent flier status, the fare paid, and how long the traveler has been waiting.

In the broadest sense, we airport travelers are, essentially, tagged parcels moving around a delivery system much as those one finds at FedEx or UPS. Yet the tracking of our movement is of a far cruder precision than what one finds at both of those companies. True, major gains have been achieved in this area in recent years and nearly every airline now boasts about its proficiency in connecting its technical infrastructure to both us and to the Internet. Now it’s time they applied some of those efforts to upgrading the old standby list.