On several occasions, we've drawn your attention to the organization known as "Airhitch®" (www.airhitch.org; or e-mail info-at-airhitch-dot-org), which can send you to Europe for $169 each way (or even one-way!) at the very peak of the travel season; it also achieves similar pricing miracles to the Caribbean, to either coast of the U.S. from the other coast, from the West and Pacific Northwest to Europe, and elsewhere.

The catch? You don't know the specific day on which you'll leave or the precise city in Europe to which you'll fly until you actually fly -- because you catch your flight based on the information Airhitch® provides just a day or two before you've told them you'd be ready to leave (although they usually -- repeat, usually -- get you to the place you've specified).

Who would put up with such travel uncertainty? Why is all the vagueness necessary? How can travelers cope with any problems which might arise? In an article written for this daily news magazine, Robert Segelbaum -- founder of Airhitch® -- describes the circumstances which led him and others to create Airhitch®, and the philosophy which it embodies. We print his article verbatim and unedited below:

You've possibly heard of it, in any one of a variety of ways (including on the Internet); but information has been vague, hazy, perhaps contradictory, somehow "iffy," making it all seem kind of "flakey," or suspicious, or "too good to be true."

You've heard it's probably possible to get over the Atlantic to Europe, virtually any time you want, for the cost of a few days' part-time wages in a McDonald's. And for a few more bucks (the cost again of getting over), you've heard it's even possible to get back!

You've heard you don't have to commit to anything -- to flying either direction on any specific flight or date; or even to a return trip! You've heard of people who have taken off for Europe, fallen in love with either some place over there, or the WHOLE CONTINENT, or some PERSON over there...and decided just to STAY!

You've heard you don't really know anything specific about the flight -- what airline it's with, what precise day it will leave, or even where precisely it will be leaving FROM or flying TO -- until at best a few days before you fly.

You've maybe heard (if you've heard about it on the Web) that it has something to do with flying as an air courier. (FALSE!)

You've maybe heard a horror story or two -- a friend who knows someone whose sister GOT STUCK IN EUROPE for a few days trying to Airhitch®! (True: it can happen! But is it really the WORST thing in the world -- to be stuck in Europe for a few extra days? [Anyway: it doesn't happen very often (if people don't WANT it to happen -- sometimes they actually DO!)]

Here, then, for the intensely curious and somewhat adventurous, for those who seek to understand not only the "what" and the "how" of things but also the "why", is a theoretical/practical guide to what Airhitching is, and how it can help you (maybe!) -- but, perhaps more importantly, WHAT IT IS NOT, and what its limitations are.

I. HOW IT ALL STARTED: ORIGINS OF AIRHITCH®

The year was 1969, and American youth had discovered a New Way to spend summer vacation (other than a visit to the Catskills -- have you seen "Dirty Dancing"?) This New Way was, as the manager of the resort portrayed in that film had prophesied, "EUROPE!".

The only problem was, that it cost an arm and a leg to do this, and thus the experience was within the financial reach of only the upper middle class. Nobody else could entertain the idea. Airfares were such that one had to invest a small fortune in such a trip, and even at this rather huge expense, one was limited in a variety of ways in terms of their trip "parameters" -- minimum/maximum length of stay, amount of advance planning required, etc.

But a fairly determined group of LOWER middle-class college students from the Midwest, of modest family incomes, whose passion for travel and exposure to new geographical experiences caused them to scrimp and save throughout their entire four years as undergraduates to be able to afford a trip over after graduation, accidentally discovered, through some rather bizarre twists of fate during the course of their journey, the existence of a vast network of what might be paradoxically termed an UNDERGROUND aviation on the Atlantic basin. They found out that if you knew the right people, were not afraid to use a telephone, were not afraid to stick out your thumb on occasion if necessary, and were not terribly concerned about the SPECIFICS of your travel, it was possible to get "over the pond" in either direction, just about any time you wanted to, at VERY affordable costs!

Because of the obvious similarities borne by this style of travel to the hitchhiker's travel style, the NAME of the system, or method, or approach, or concept, or whatever it was, seemed natural: "Airhitch®." It was like hitching a ride through the air.

After availing himself of the services of this network, and finding out that it had actually made it possible for him to realize his dreams, whereas without the existence of the network he probably would not have been able to, one such student -- the writer of this article -- decided that this underground aviation network needed to be known to his friends and acquaintances -- and that was the start of Airhitch®.

During the ensuing decades, two types of phenomena made it possible for the concept to be expanded and exposed to the general public: one an EVOLUTIONARY phenomenon, and one a REVOLUTIONARY one. The former, the evolutionary phenomenon, was the progressive refinement, development, formalization, and organization of the system; whereas the latter, the REVOLUTIONARY phenomenon, was the Carter administration's deregulation of the airline industry in 1978, which made it no longer necessary for the system to stay "underground."

II. THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF AIRHITCH®

A pair of theoretical questions are often posed to me by those interested in what Airhitch® is "all about" at its core: one, How Is It Possible? and two, Why Isn't It MORE Possible?

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?

One of the things I noticed, in 1969, when I took that trip across the Atlantic, was that airplanes were flying on the average half-empty. This meant that BILLIONS of dollars were going to waste putting a certain number of unoccupied seats in the air without recovering the costs of those seats. [Although the airlines would argue that they recovered the costs of those seats by pricing the OCCUPIED seats high, this actually very rarely turned out to be the case, which is one major reason that so many airlines have gone bankrupt or been forced to allow other airlines to acquire them, over the five or so decades of widespread commercial aviation activity.]

Why has there always been so much chronic overcapacity in the air transport industry? It's really quite simple. There is a consensus dominant (if not unanimous!) among the Old Boys' club that forms the cadre of top airline marketing execs that the most valuable commodity they have to sell to the public is SCHEDULE; that is, that the most important single factor in attracting people willing to pay high fares to an air carrier is its ability to present a wide variety of scheduling/itinerary choices so that there is always a flight going where the passenger wants to go when (s) he wants to go there.

Whether this philosophy is "right" or "wrong" or even "useful" is a matter of opinion and debate, but one logical consequence of it is BEYOND debate: if an airline is to have a plane going everywhere all the time, it's going to have to put a LOT of planes in the sky -- far more than are necessary to accommodate the demand for seats on those planes -- whence derives the overcapacity problem: it's simply "built in to the system", and CAN'T BE AVOIDED, without dropping the airlines marketing philosophy which has been firmly entrenched ever since the beginnings of air transportation. [When I started Airhitch®, the overcapacity problem was obvious, because every plane I would get on would have empty seats; but what I didn't know at the time, and only learned about years later (as it appears to be kind of a "dirty little secret" of the air transport industry) was that beyond the vast numbers of empty seats in airborne aircraft, there was ANOTHER kind of overcapacity, which you can view directly at the webpage www.mojaveairport.com. This is the page for Mojave Airport, a storage airport on the Arizona-California border where the world's UNUTILIZED commercial jet aircraft -- aircraft that have been purchased or leased by airlines but are not flying because there is no demand for their capacity -- are parked and stored, requiring continued monthly payments on mortgages or leases as well as storage costs. At any given moment, a visit to Mojave Airport (or its website!) will show you rows upon rows of 747s, DC-10s, L-1011s, and other "jumbo jets" sitting idle in the desert, with SOMEBODY paying heavily for their ownership and/or upkeep, and not recovering ANY of that cost.]

But suppose you are NOT a passenger who has to be in a particular place at a particular time. Suppose you DON'T CARE whether you fly from Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark Airport for your trip to Paris, you just want to get the lowest price? Suppose you don't even really care whether you land in PARIS, because if you landed in Amsterdam or Brussels or London it would be just a little extra adventure, a little extra pleasure, to get yourself from there to Paris? Suppose you also don't care whether you leave at 6PM, 9PM, or 11PM, or even whether you leave on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday?

While it's true that maybe 80 or 90 percent of the traveling public does NOT fit the above description, there are probably at least 25,000,000 people who, on occasion, do, and they are known as "unstructured travelers". They can "fit in" to any seat on any airplane that might happen to be flying even on APPROXIMATELY the date and itinerary that they would optimally prefer. So, if there are 25,000,000 seats flying empty a year around the globe (and there must be at least that many -- just visit the page on the Airhitch® Web site, www.airhitch.org/info.htm#how, that gives the statistical bases for this observation), then to fill up all these seats AND enable travel possibilities for a lot of people who would not otherwise have them, it's just a question of matchmaking! Enter Airhitch®, which simply acts as a CLEARINGHOUSE between airlines who have seats that are left unsold at the last minute, and people who would dearly love to be in those seats when the plane takes off, but IF AND ONLY IF the price is right!

WHY IS IT NOT *MORE* POSSIBLE?

The above picture is pretty rosy. It seems so simple, you say, why haven't I heard of it before, why isn't it all over national network TV, WHY DIDN'T I KNOW ABOUT THIS? And, why have I heard such horror stories about it?

There are very sound socio-politico-economic answers to these questions, but in my humble opinion, the major reason Airhitching is not "more possible" is purely psychological -- that is, pertaining to the psychology of those in the air transport industry charged with the responsibility of marketing its product. And the second major reason is bureaucratic: the industry suffers from an extraordinary degree of bureaucratic stupidity of the left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand is doing variety.

We will now examine both of these areas in turn.

On the psychological side, most airline marketeers seem to be driven by two opposing forces -- the same forces which, according to Adam Smith, drive ANY market: greed and fear. In the particular context of airline marketing, the greed dictates that prices be kept as high as possible for as long as possible, while the fear dictates that as the product gets near to its point of perishability, a buyer be found for it at any price rather than let it perish illiquid. The problem is, that no one in the airlines charged with the responsibility of bringing in a high price for the product wants to admit that (s)he failed at this mission, and succumbing to the fear of having the product perish valueless is an admission of this failure. Although fear of having the seat perish valueless seems to be present, a greater kind of fear seems to have predominance: fear of having sold the seat at too low a price. Although from a purely logical point of view this situation seems absurd to the casual observer, the airline industry basically accepts it as a given. And it may be the case that the situation is a given because nobody pays attention to empty seats, but everybody pays attention (notably accountants) to seats sold at too LOW a price. If a seat is sold at all, the reasoning goes, then it could have been sold at a higher price, if only the person whose responsibility to sell it knew what he was doing. But if the seat doesn't get sold at all, then that's nobody's fault, that's just the way things go, you win some, you lose some. It seems bizarre, but there you have it!

On the bureaucratic side, even if certain people in the airlines can be gotten to admit that a seat going empty and bringing in zero dollars is worse for the bottom line of the company than a seat which brings in a few, or even many, dollars less than the lowest price anyone had anticipated selling the seat at, the GREED factor keeps price-lowering decisions from being made until, because of the communication problems inherent in any bureaucracy, it is for all practical purposes too late to put the seat on the market at the new price: the company simply can't move fast enough. Most airline marketing schemata basically write off a seat as lost and wasted at least three days before it departs. This is because the procedure for converting an interested potential passenger into an actual, carried passenger, strapped into his seat with the plane taking off, is, with few exceptions, ENORMOUSLY CUMBERSOME, and sometimes involves middlemen, and the more middlemen who are involved, the more cumbersome it gets. Often, the air carriers consider going through the process SIMPLY NOT WORTH IT for the small amount of "incremental revenue" they perceive would be gained from such an operation.

So, in the final analysis, airlines are very reluctant to fill up their seats. I often have to deal with this kind of resistance in trying to convince them to do it: to simply act in their own interest and stop wasting product. And sometimes, when all else fails, I simply adopt a whimsical approach: "Gee, wouldn't it be interesting if the airline industry actually felt that they were in business to put people on their planes instead of keeping them off them?" (Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't!)

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: WHERE DO *YOU* FIT IN?

A buzz-phrase of the ecological sixties, when Airhitch® started, was "Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished", but we might appropriately invert this phrase to adapt it to air transport by pointing out that "The presence of systemic wisdom can provide great rewards." What do we mean by "systemic wisdom"? Just this: understanding what the system IS, how it functions, and what YOUR role and function within it is.

In the system that is the air transport industry, seen through the eyes of the airline marketer, the function of a passenger is simply to provide revenue to fly the planes with. Airline marketers would love to be able to fly their planes DEAD EMPTY, that way they would not have to put up with all the hassles that putting passengers on them creates! But who would then pay the costs of flying the planes? And so, reluctantly, they are forced to recruit passengers for them.

So it is important for you as a passenger or potential passenger to realize that any time you think you might want to fly somewhere, you put yourself into a kind of game of "chicken" or WAR OF NERVES with the guys who run the airlines (and they are, virtually all, guys, not gals). If you can hold off long enough, and they see they are not able to fill up the plane you want to fly on fast enough, they will lower the price they require from you to put you on the plane; but, if you wait too long, they will say, sorry, you blew it, it's just not worth it to us to put you on the plane at the eleventh hour, even though we know the seat will perish valueless, it's just too much trouble and we can't deal with it! What Airhitch® tries to do for you (and, on the whole, succeeds in doing) is to SYSTEMATIZE your relations with the airlines along these lines. It attempts to MINIMIZE the force of the airline argument that "it's not worth it", by POSITIONING huge numbers of people to do this kind of thing, and to give you some useful weapons in the war of nerves, first, by enabling you to play it with numerous airlines and other transportation-providing risk-takers ALL AT THE SAME TIME, so that the risk on your part -- that you will hold out too long, that they will let the seat go empty and leave you standing in the terminal -- is minimized; and, second, by focusing your attention on the true geographical and temporal LATITUDES that govern your travel needs and getting you comfortable with the idea of POSSIBILITY instead of GUARANTEE (if you can live with going to anywhere in a 300-mile radius circle around some point, and with traveling anytime during a multi-day time interval, you have that many more opportunities to be accepted on a flight at low cost, than if you were more restrictive in your requirements).

Copyright 1997, Robert Segelbaum