In Era of Tight Competition, Romance of Travel Is History : Transportation: Frugal Americans are demanding lower fares and going farther to make connections at bigger airports. The glamour of traveling has clearly taken a back seat, experts say.

Airlines are vacating airports where they can’t make money, Amtrak is cutting service, and you can’t necessarily leave the driving to Greyhound.

More often than not, it’s tougher to get there from here by public transportation. Especially from places like bucolic Santa Rosa.

American Airlines pulled out of the wine country town this year, dropping seven daily turboprop flights. United Airlines’ commuter service is all that remains at the one-gate airport.

But the fares are too high for many, the few discounted seats on the 19-passenger “puddle jumpers” sell out quickly and Monday or Friday flights are filled weeks in advance.

Rather than fly from the local airport to make connections at a big city, more people are driving or taking shuttle buses to more distant airports.

“Maybe a couple of years ago, my travel agent would say go to Santa Rosa, but now I’m forced to go down to San Francisco,” said Harvey Posert, a spokesman for the Robert Mondavi Winery. “And you never know how long of a ride it will be. It could be an hour, it could be two hours.”

Traveling, many say, has never been farther from the glamorous image decades ago of smartly dressed, martini-toasting passengers settling in for voyages to places only seen in glossy magazines.

Exotic excursions have been replaced by passengers schlepping through air terminals to make connections, or whiling away the hours of a layover eating $2 hot dogs before wedging between the armrests of an economy-class seat.

To a large extent, the hassles of American travel in the 1990s are traceable to the wrenching changes that have reshaped how airlines, railroads and bus lines provide service.

When airlines cut back on destinations, small towns are the first to go. Big carriers have concentrated on bigger cities with high-fare-paying business travelers who usually patronize longer, more profitable routes.

After losing money and passengers to Southwest Airlines, for example, American stopped operating San Jose as a so-called hub--the centralized airport where passengers can connect to flights elsewhere.

The effect was reduced service to cities throughout the West. Reno, Southwest and other airlines stepped in to pick up some of the business, but many cities were left with less competition, higher fares and fewer connections.

Like the rest of the economy, the travel industry has responded to a new breed of frugal spenders born of the recession and slow recovery. People don’t feel as free to spend extra money on travel. They won’t go on a vacation if the fare isn’t low enough.

Amtrak recently reduced the number of long-distance trains and substituted buses for trains between St. Louis and Centralia, Ill. The railroad also has closed 15 remote ticket offices. Like the airlines, Amtrak’s cuts have focused on routes used by leisure travelers.

The story is much bleaker for bus travel, which never had much of an exotic tinge anyway. Since Greyhound’s drivers went on strike in 1990, the nation’s biggest intercity bus company has dropped about 500 destinations from its network and cut the frequency of departures on some routes.

In some ways, life has gotten easier for business travelers. American, for example, has added more trips to the competitive Dallas-Chicago route. Air shuttles between frenetic business centers like New York-Washington and Los Angeles-San Francisco are among the most convenient in the world.

Lee Julliarat, a newspaper editor in Klamath Falls, Ore., finds it’s usually easier--and always cheaper--to drive.

The small town about 20 miles north of the California border also lost its American service when the carrier pared flights from San Jose. United flies south from Klamath Falls and the regional airline Horizon Air flies north to Portland.

United replaced some of American’s flights, but Julliarat says the fares aren’t worth it anymore. During a recent fare sale, he flew from San Francisco to Japan for a little more than it would have cost to fly from Klamath Falls to San Francisco.

“One of the problems of being here is just trying to get anyplace,” said Julliarat. “We’re more remote than we used to be.”

Sometimes the changes affect more down-to-earth needs. The turboprops United has been using on the route lately don’t have lavatories.

“Some people will pay the extra money and go to Medford (70 miles west) for a jet,” said Michell O’Leary, a travel agent at Travel Unlimited in Klamath Falls.

Although small airlines are popping up regularly to fill the gaps left by the reductions of big airlines, they don’t necessarily provide the same convenience. This is partly because they don’t fly using the hub system. They fly from city to city, stitching together routes based on demand.

The typical destination for one of the non-hub airlines is a medium-sized city with enough potential passengers, but that isn’t so crowded that airports are vulnerable to long, costly delays.

Many passengers are trading convenience for savings by traveling sometimes for hours to get to an airport where they can catch a cheap Southwest flight. Small bus enterprises have cropped up in towns served by Southwest to shuttle cost-conscious passengers.

Northern California travel agents say that more clients are willing to pay $25 to $40 to take a shuttle bus to Oakland or San Francisco to catch cheaper flights, rather than pay even more to fly to the bigger airports.

“Probably 50% of the people don’t fly out of here,” said Rod Dinger, acting director of the Redding, Calif., Municipal Airport. “If they can save $400, then they’ll do that and drive (150 miles) to Sacramento” to hook up with Southwest.