This is pretty funny. It's like a case study in the armchair expert. Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something, so they just started googling facts and figures, tried to find a trend, then looked for evidence to back up the trend they were looking for, then googled for "explanations" (read: news articles from mainstream media) to justify the trends they were looking for. At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry. Just a lot of googling, vague questions, and hand-wavey answers.
The weirdest part is how subjective the question is. It's like saying, is life getting worse? It turns out there's more than a few ways of looking at that. Air travel is cheap and widely available, despite coming out of a global pandemic, not to mention the global recession before that, among other minor blips. Oh, but you were delayed in getting in your magic metal tube that hurtles through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, letting you sip beer and watch movies in your PJs while traveling thousands of miles in a few hours, arriving safer than any other form of transportation? Man, that's terrible.
The weirdest part is how subjective the question is. It's like saying, is life getting worse? It turns out there's more than a few ways of looking at that. Air travel is cheap and widely available, despite coming out of a global pandemic, not to mention the global recession before that, among other minor blips. Oh, but you were delayed in getting in your magic metal tube that hurtles through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, letting you sip beer and watch movies in your PJs while traveling thousands of miles in a few hours, arriving safer than any other form of transportation? Man, that's terrible.