The cost of travel in the slowpocalypse

This is going to be a moving target, but driving is cheaper than flying.

Something we will likely see more and more of.

By Anthony Valterra

As I write this, Southwest Airlines has cancelled more than 3,000 flights. It would be easy to chalk this up to the weather, but if I had to lay down my Federal Reserve notes, I would bet that they will find Southwest has been underinvesting in its own infrastructure. As this slowpocalypse grinds on, one obvious means of dealing with narrowing margins is to put off needed regular investments: repairs, upgrades, restocking, refurbishing, cleaning, etc., etc. None of those things add to your profit margin. They are merely money spent to keep infrastructure the same. If you can put it off, then you can keep that money and call it profit.

In a system driven by quarterly reports to the stock market, holding off on expenses that won’t increase your margins just makes sense. You might argue that this is just putting off a repair that will need to be made at a later date, and in fact that expense might be worse because of the added time. But as a business manager once said to me, “That’s a problem for next quarter.”

With that in mind, Lisa and I experimented with driving to Charleston, SC, rather than flying. Lisa has covered the carbon comparison in a post here. But in this essay, I want to address what the businessman cares about most: the bottom line.

Here’s how I derived the numbers below.

• We actually took seven nights to make this trip, staying five nights in Charleston and two on the road.

• I estimated what we would have spent if we had flown in one day there and one day back, but stayed five nights in Charleston nonetheless.

• Then I estimated what we would have spent if we had lengthened our actual stay in Charleston to seven nights, cutting out the extra travel days but keeping to a seven-night trip.

If you are history buff like me, the USS Yorktown and Laffey are fascinating!

I assumed that what we spent while in Charleston would remain the same. For example, we would have toured the USS Yorktown in all cases. I assumed that what we spent on food would have averaged the same, so to calculate groceries, I merely divided our total grocery bill by five and then used that number to tack on two extra days. I did the same with our lodging in Charleston minus the cleaning deposit (which would have remained the same in all cases).

Here are some things I did not include, as they were just too picayune. I did not calculate depreciation on our car. We did travel 1,723 miles in our car, and that would result in wear and tear. I did not include insurance on our plane tickets although we could have bought some. We did laundry once in the place we stayed, and I did not include that as a plus or minus.

The results show that driving is cheaper than flying, no matter how you slice it.

Driving compared to two extra days in Charleston by airplane saved us $900.

Driving compared to staying the same number of days in Charleston by airplane saved us $1,400.

The big differences were these. First of all, we drive a Prius, which sips gas daintily. We spent $183 in gas, and an additional $364 in lodging on the road. Add to that $185 in food while driving, and you get a travel total of $734. Compare that to flying. The tickets (holiday season) with tax would have run about $1600 for both of us round trip (this includes a rental car and gas for the car). You can toss another $60 in for airport food. In case you have not noticed, flights have gone up as much as 42 percent in the past year, and the only way it will go down is a recession so bad that airlines will cut costs to nearly zero profit or even loss leading. This, of course, will cause bankruptcies, which will reduce the number of airlines, which will allow them to raise prices again. So long term—no relief.

We’re proud of how proud my son is of his BMW, even if status is not our thing. It’s a top-notch means of conveyance.

Both Lisa and I are careful about what we eat. Driving and taking lodging with a kitchen helped us save our money and our health. Rather then eat out for every meal, we brought some food with us (including food from our garden), bought groceries there, and cooked our own food while in Charleston. Our grocery bill was $132, and I estimated that it would have been $170 if we had stayed an extra two days. That $40 increase is nothing compared to even the cost of airport food. In addition, it could be argued that a large portion of the grocery bill is offset by the food we brought along.

As Lisa details in her post on the small carbon footprint for driving, we had not planned the drive to Charleston as well as we could have. We did not take into account the assumed error in GPS maps, the impact of driving at night, and the general stress of driving. But we adjusted a great deal on the way home. We started earlier, avoided driving at night, and took our meals on the road with food we had with us. But still, long drives are stressful and hard on the body. Airplanes are stressful and hard on the body in different way. This is one of those things that we all need to calculate for ourselves.

But purely from a dollar point of view driving was much cheaper. It cost more in time, and was hard on us in some ways and easier in others. As I mentioned in the subtitle to this post, “This is going to be a moving target.” I predict that each year the balance on the best way to travel will shift. Airplanes may get cheaper, then less reliable, then more expensive. The same may be true for cars, boats, and trains. Travel during this long decline, like most things, will require constant monitoring and adjustment to circumstances. There will be no easy right answer, and whatever answer you find today may be different tomorrow.