Compass Dispatches: Technology, involution, and the value of upgrades for the return journey
Field notes from the departure lounge of historical travel*
Welcome to this week's Compass Dispatches, where we contemplate the wisdom of paying premium prices for better service whilst chewing diligently on an airport lounge bread roll that could easily double as a ship's biscuit for an 18th-century sailor.
We are writing from Boston's Logan Airport. Though the bakery selection leaves much to be desired, it is at least "free," and the experience provides a nice respite from this morning's adventures navigating the backstreets of Boston's northern suburbs.**
There are many ways that technology has improved the travel experience, and we are not Luddites. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze represent incredible advances from our early days as young roadtrippers navigating by the stars, a collection of outdated Rand McNally maps handed down by Dad, and the guiding hand of fate. That said, over-reliance on technology can be a pitfall of modern travel, and our AI overlords in their steady efforts to erode our critical thinking abilities occasionally overreach the limits of their algorithmic inspiration.
For example, this morning we asked both Waze and Google to navigate a route from the coast of Maine to the rental car return at Logan Airport. Simple enough, right? But just at the end of our trip, Waze decided to be helpful and redirected us to the fastest possible route to where it believed we were headed, without consideration for the potential consequences of routes best left untraveled. It's rather like peering off the Cliffs of Moher, spotting a delightful beach below, asking your Irish guide, "What's the quickest way down there?" and receiving a helpful shove.
In this case, our guide was Waze and our cliff's edge was the suburb of Everett. This is a charming working-class suburb where the locals have developed rather creative interpretations of traffic signals, and where one's satellite navigation system displays an inexplicable blind spot regarding certain entrepreneurial automotive redistribution schemes.
As Waze cheerfully directed us from narrow residential streets to dodgy alleys and through abandoned parking lots, we found ourselves consistently wondering whether this was indeed the optimal route to the airport. Like any good journey, mysteries abounded. Potential dangers lurked unseen. Success seemed like a distant dream.**
Spoiler alert: We did not get carjacked but did appreciate, if only in retrospect, the impromptu tour of the suburbs. We saw some lovely fixer-upper duplexes that we'd be mad not to purchase, given the ever-expanding amoeba of gentrification slowly spreading across all of Eastern Massachusetts. Carjackers are no match for proper villains like “Suburban Moms who Love to Flip Houses.”
After finally tracking down the car hire return, we stood at the airline check-in counter and quietly handed over both our principles and our credit card. The upgrade seemed perfectly reasonable compensation for what our nervous system had just endured.
The extra expenditure was also part of our guiding philosophy. Your hosts have been actively leading travel programmes for decades, and here is our professional tip: when planning a trip for clients or students, make the return leg slightly easier than the outbound journey. When Jeremiah was running travel programmes for students from Beijing to Yunnan, budgets often dictated that they could only fly one way. The choice was straightforward.
On the outbound leg, everyone is fresh and brimming with anticipation. You can get away with thirty-hour train journeys, bumpy roads, and whatever dubious offerings the station café happens to be serving. But on the return journey? People are knackered, patience has evaporated, and all anyone wants is a proper shower, clean clothes, and the most straightforward path home available.
That's precisely when you spend the extra, whether it's for a direct flight, a taxi instead of the bus, or, in this case, a business-class upgrade that costs roughly the same as dinner at a Geneva restaurant but still feels like a bargain when the alternative is being treated like a freight.
Because, not to be alarmist, but today's airports, especially in America, are harbingers of the brewing class war. Call it corporate "involution": raising prices, cutting staff, piling on Byzantine new rules, and systematically hollowing out the standard experience so it can be made positively luxurious for a paying minority. The premium lane moves with Swiss efficiency; the economy queue feels like an endurance event designed by someone nursing a personal grudge against the travelling public.
We've observed variations of this phenomenon in other places, including Britain and China, but in the United States, the local culture gives it a peculiar charge. Americans have grown up expecting deference, comfort, and service as fundamental birthrights and react rather poorly when those expectations are thwarted by circumstance. Since COVID, the gap between expectation and reality has widened into something approaching a chasm, with airlines seemingly determined to make the basic flying experience so thoroughly unpleasant that paying extra feels less like an indulgence and more like the price one must pay for basic human dignity.
The result is a well-documented and oft-lamented downward spiral of worsening passenger behavior, cratering staff morale, and plummeting standards of value and service in absolute free fall.
The truly diabolical bit is how effective the premium pitch is. Here we are, dancing to the siren’s call, paying hard currency to make the journey home marginally less torturous lest we snap and end up in a viral video.
It's also, we suspect, a sign of advancing age and declining tolerance for unnecessary suffering. Twenty years ago, we'd have worn that harrowing drive through Everett like a badge of honour, rawdogging economy class, buying drinks, and regaling our seat mates squashed three-in-a-line with tales of our near-misses and heroic navigation choices.
Perhaps this is what growing up looks like in the modern travel economy: recognising that some battles simply aren't worth fighting, particularly when the alternative involves paying a fee to be treated like an actual human being rather than a mildly inconvenient piece of luggage.
That's all from the road, where we continue to marvel at humanity's talent for creating problems and then charging premium rates to solve them.
—The By Their Own Compass Team
*This week, literally from a departure lounge…
**At least one of our team has suggested nothing is wrong with the Boston area that couldn’t be fixed with the long overdue reappointment of His Majesty's royal governor and a battalion of Redcoats on standby in the harbor.