Blame Baggage Fees for Long Airport Lines?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Lines at some airports have gotten nightmarish as travelers head into the summer's first holiday weekend. As a result, a top Transportation Security Administration official has lost his job, airlines are pleading that Congress spend more money on the TSA, and two U.S. senators have called on airlines to stop charging fees for checked bags as a way to reduce the burden on TSA screeners.

The crisis made national news this month when hundreds of people missed their flights at Chicago's O'Hare because of two- and three-hour security lines. For their part, airlines have begun to lend staff to help the TSA manage lines and guide travelers through rituals that should be familiar by now, like taking off shoes. American Airlines says it will spend $4 million to hire contract staff for such roles.

The airlines have asked Congress to "return" $13 billion in TSA fees that have, since 2013, been diverted to paying down the national debt, largely a symbolic gesture. Meanwhile, baggage fees are in the crosshairs. U.S. Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-N.Y.) have asked airlines to stop charging people for luggage, arguing that the fees encourage them to schlep more items on board, which overloads the screening system.

In a working paper, Martin Dresner, chair of the Department of Logistics, Business and Public Policy at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has demonstrated how fees did indeed significantly change consumer behavior from 2007 to 2009, when they swept the industry. Among passengers originating at the three Washington-Baltimore commercial airports, the proportion who checked bags on the carriers that instituted the baggage fees dropped from 59 percent to 47 percent, Dresner found. The implication is that more travelers carried their own luggage through TSA checkpoints.

To his surprise, the percentage point drop for long trips — meaning three or more nights, when you'd expect people to need large suitcases — was about the same as for short trips.

Airlines have come to rely on those fees, too. In an earlier paper, published in 2015, Dresner and co-authors found that fees had grown from providing 0.6 percent of revenue for U.S. airlines in 2008 to 2.4 percent. The fees are also attractive to airlines because people appear to be less sensitive to baggage fees than to straightforward fare increases — they will accept a $1 fee more readily than a $1 fare increase. "I don't see the airlines changing their policies anytime soon, unless they are forced to," Dresner says. When people carry bags on with them, that frees up more space for freight. Not to mention that many consumers — at least those who save money by not checking bags — also like them. Those who find fees outrageous can travel with the one airline that has embraced a no-fee policy as a marketing point: Southwest.

The security logjam at airports could be seen as part of a broader problem in transportation. "In general, we fail to invest sufficiently in infrastructure," Dresner says. (Many highways will also be clogged this weekend, because they have not been improved in decades.) Adding TSA staff or contract workers would be expensive, Dresner says, "but hardly as significant as trying to fix all of the bridges that need to be fixed in this country." Either fliers or airlines will probably have to step up to spend more on adding TSA staff, or contract workers — or to undertake more significant changes to airports, such as creating more efficient spaces for people to shed their shoes and separate their laptops in advance.

There's plenty of room for improvement, too, in passenger behavior. Fifteen years after 9/11, too many people appear to be blindsided by those rules about liquids, shoes and laptops. And more people could take advantage of TSA Pre, in which, for $85 (for five years), passengers can skip some of the security steps and use special lines. "There are different ways you can deal with this problem," Dresner says. "You can increase the through-put by adding lanes. You can try to change the behavior of customers. A third is that airlines could be more strict about the way they enforce their carry-on luggage rules — an area where they are extremely lax."

All airlines have sizing bins to indicate the limits of carry-on baggage. "Have you ever been asked to put your bag into one?" Dresner asks.

The improving economy has probably exacerbated the problems at airports, he observes. Not only are more people flying but the availability of jobs makes it easier for TSA agents to leave their high-hassle, relatively-low-pay positions for other opportunities. And since the jobs require intense training, they can be hard to fill quickly. "Probably firing the senior administrator responsible for security is not going to solve much," Dresner says.