What If Sequestration Had a Huge Effect on Travel and Nobody Noticed?

March 11, 2013 at 6:06 PM | by Omri | Comment (1)

It's difficult to talk about sequesteration, even and especially as it impacts travel, in a non-partisan way. Both sides have their talking points, and collectively the debate is so grating that last week we got reduced to talking about vending machines instead.

Nonetheless you can kind of tell which way the political winds are blowing, because as of this morning the left is trying to criticize the right for celebrating too soon. As an apocalypse, at least from the outside, sequester is turning into the biggest letdown since Y2K. Sure the White House cancelled its tours, which was a delightfully bitchy inside-the-Beltway move (those tours are scheduled through individual Congressional offices so Congressional staffers were the ones who had to call constituents and explain that little Timmy couldn't go to the White House any more). But other than that, meh. Right?

Wrong says DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is quoted in Politico insisting that lines at TSA are "150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect" because of the sequester. Now as Politico notes, there have been no "first-person accounts of long security lines...flood[ing] the Internet" and even TSA admitted that "travelers were not yet feeling the impact." So it must be that lines doubled and nobody noticed. It could happen!

And wrong says the president and CEO of Marriott International. Arne Sorenson gave an exclusive interview to Arabian Business, in which he angrily explained that spending cuts will—according to the outlet's summary of his remarks—"have a significant impact on the travel industry." The parts of the interview that actually contain Sorenson's quotes don't really unpack why it will have such a significant impact, but he mentions something about the sequester being bad for business travel. Now the business travel market amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars every year while in the short term, the sequester cuts $85 billion total from everything, including things that don't affect business travel. So we're not sure the math works out. But maybe it does!

You guys, we're not sure how much more of this we can take.

[Photo: ABC7DC / YouTube]

Comment (1)

Return to » What If Sequestration Had a Huge Effect on Travel and Nobody Noticed?

You write: "Wrong says DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is quoted in Politico insisting that lines at TSA are "150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect" because of the sequester Your link produces this: lines at some airports are already "150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect," although TSA said travelers were not yet feeling the impact. Ms Napolitano is referring to longer lines at CPB checkpoints, where the sequester effects are being felt already. Cuts at Customs have already begun, not yet at TSA. Try to use some journalistic basics if you wish to consider yourself qualified to write this information for publication. Who,What,Where and When. Good luck in your future endeavors.

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