First, I confess that until not long ago I was an airline employee in the commercial and systems areas for 13+ years, so maybe I should have answers to some of the issues posed here. Well, not really! But, at least now I feel that I can better help, being an outsider with insider knowledge.
After all, flying as an airline customer is a very different experience from flying as an airline employee. In fact, one key to the claimed airlines' lack of empathy with their customers may be in the famous and so much appreciated airlines' employee travel benefits and policies: airlines' employees don't really live a normal traveller experience when they travel business or leisure with their own employer airline, so it's hard for them to go back to the office from their latest trip and bring good ideas of improvement to the traveller's experience based on their own travel experience. Instead, when I used to work for a supermarket chain, on weekends I had the real supermarket customer experience, so I could come back to the office on Mondays with good improvement ideas based on my own experience. At the airline, I wasn't the most popular coleague when I once dared to suggest the elimination of the employee travel benefits. But, there sure is an intermediate solution to the issue...
On the "external front", the airline industry has faced huge challenges over the last decade and a half that have distracted and slowed down its innovation pace. Just the escalating terrorism related safety requirements by themselves could have destroyed the whole industry, sucking billions of dollars in investments and adding hours of extra costs and hassle to each trip, spendings and efforts that didn't improve at all the customer experience, but made it much harder and unpleasant.
So, in the era of low cost satellites, ubiquitous WiFi, smartphones and mobile, RFID, cloud, GPS, Waze, Google Maps, Skype, beacons, etc, customers wonder why airlines -having been a flagship of innovation in the past- have been so slow to embrace the new technologies in some obvious areas.
Let's take for example airplane tracking: how can these days a commercial airplane disappear in the air without leaving a trace? Shouldn't airplanes' trajectories be monitored in real time by the airlines and aircraft manufacturers all the time? (This is at least what customers expect these days!) Why do we still need to find a physical black box to discover what happened with a crashed airplane? Couldn't a cloud based black box be a better solution?
The same is true for luggage. How can luggage be lost these days? This is a really perturbing and mysterious experience for customers. In a recent non-stop international business trip the airline lost my luggage (along with the luggage of other 3 or 4 customers), so I didn't have anything to wear for the meeting I had at destination next morning. I was taking my return flight a couple of hours after the meeting and still nobody could give me an answer regarding my luggage. When I was back at origin they told me the luggage had been sent to destination, so I should go home and wait it to come back next morning! After telling the airline agent that I was not going to move from there until I got my luggage, it mysteriously appeared...
Let's focus now on a different area: business travel. Given the nature of my previous job, over the past decade I had to travel for business reasons at a rate of 5 to 10 times per year, normally on medium (3 to 6 hrs flights) or long hauls (longer than 6 hrs flights). For a long haul trip between similar time zones I would typically book a flight departing at night, (try to) sleep on board, arrive early next day at destination, take a shower, have my work meetings and come back that night. It was unthinkable to fly a long haul business trip during the day if you could fly at night, the reason being that we would loose a full work day (and the corresponding company meetings) and we would have to pay an extra hotel night at destination.
Even in the best first or business cabins that I've had the chance to travel, sleeping on board is far from sleeping on a real bed at home or in an hotel (and, if I get to sleep on board, I usually have terrible nightmares!). On the other side, for the airlines it is very hard to make the first or business cabins profitable, given their low seat density; they represent an inefficient use of the aircraft space. So, first and business cabins are a difficult business! Let me dream instead of daytime business trips, where I could comfortably work in the airplane, google for the material I need for my meetings and presentations at destination, hold my office meetings through Skype and arrive at destination ready for a good sleep on a real attached-to-Earth bed that will renovate me for a productive and necessary face-to-face meeting at destination the following day. The airline would save space in the aircraft, the customer would have a better travel experience, the crew wouldn't have to work overnight, etc. I believe an air product like this could be substantially cheaper and more convenient, so it would boost business travel (business price elasticity is low, it's true, but not necessarily in the mid-long term). Of course, the cases of long hauls or ultra long hauls between time zones with big time differences are more complicated, but, anyway, having the right technology on board to fully support business activities would undoubtedly have a positive impact on short, medium and long haul business trips.
On the leisure travel segment, the revamped zeppelin technology that is being researched and developed by some companies is a candidate to revolutionize the industry by offering a massive, cheaper alternative for short and long hauls. This technology, which should be much more efficient and environmentally cleaner than current jetliners, will have a limitation on the speed of the aircrafts (they will probably take around three times longer between any pair of cities), however, this is not a critical factor for leisure trips, neither for cargo transportation. If the zeppelins offer attractive prices for leisure and some fun on board to kill the extra travel time (long hauls would require beds on board though, which would make the economics less attractive than in the short haul case), they will most likely produce a huge boost in leisure traffic around the world.
So, maybe the landscape for air travel in the near future is one dominated by daytime jetliners in the business travel segment and zeppelins in the leisure travel and air cargo transportation segments, who knows!
http://on.rt.com/yg4ikx
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-zeppelins-giants-of-the-skies-1405094514
