Last weekend I was on an airplane for the first time since March of 2020, thanks to a family wedding, so I got a personal experience with a couple trends that we’re hearing from other people:

First, travel is back in a huge way, every flight is completely full, and many airports are even more crowded than they were before the pandemic… and the airlines are having a hard time handling it — I got a little text alert on my phone as I was waiting for the wedding to begin that our flight home had been canceled by American Airlines, whose system collapsed when many of their planes and employees were left out of place after some storms, leading them to cancel about a third of their flights over the weekend. Their best offer was to rebook us on a new flight three days later, which is ludicrous (thankfully, we found another way home on Southwest, which had similar problems a few weeks ago).

Travel is having the same “just in time fulfillment, no extra inventory, maximum efficiency” problem as many other industries right now — nobody has any flexibility, investors have rewarded the companies that squeeze out all the inefficiencies… but it’s being inefficient, by holding some inventory or having some extra flights booked or some surplus employees being trained, that gets you through crazy times when the “just in time” strategy fails you or your customers. The fact that it’s happening to everyone as the weak links in the supply chains create problems probably means that the worst offenders won’t be unduly punished by losing market share as they piss of their customers, but I’m really curious to see how it all shakes out — there will probably be winners and losers aplenty once we’re really on the other side of this great disruption, hopefully by next year sometime.

Second, it’s all tourists — Las Vegas is back in a big way, with the crowds having clearly returned to Sin City, which was busier this weekend than it was in my last visit in 2019… but there aren’t really any conventions or big meetings yet. Nobody’s dressed for work or acting serious in the airport, just thousands of crazy people getting their ya-yas out in new ways, to make up for a year and a half of moderation.

That means the ...