HereForTheBeer: Thank you, air passenger industry (and certain associated regulations), for reminding me yesterday why I quit a job in order to stop flying all the time. It's to the point that I'd rather spend 16 hours driving a thousand miles than spend five hours with airports and planes and rental cars.
jjsimp: It's getting better for frequent flyers. We have the TSA Pre lanes now which speeds us through checkout. The airplanes once in I get the better seats and sometimes get upgraded to First Class. I can use my tablet and ereader during takeoff and landing. I would have a much better time if my company stuck with one airline instead of going with the cheapest fare...being Silver on three different airlines sucks.
Also, would be nice if parents would leave their demon spawns behind when they travel, but I guess that's what the Noise Canceling headphones are for.
Also, would be nice if Airlines were forced to give people the proper amount of room. Everyone gets two armrests with ample legroom. I'm short and when I complain about legroom there is a problem. My legs should not be resting against the back of anyone's seat. I don't know how people over 6 foot fly anything but first class and exit row.
Yeah, I used to be in that frequent flyer upgrade group. Was funny, getting bumped to first and sitting in my dusty, stinky work clothes next to the suits. And I started out flying in the days when you got checked bags free.
My bitches Sunday were twofold:
We got to the airport in El Paso and were greeted with a very long line for check-in. Stood there for 20 minutes, wondering why it wasn't moving, before another flyer walked back and mentioned this was the line for those trying to rebook their cancelled Dallas flight. Note that there wasn't a second line at that point for those flying elsewhere, and no one from the airline had tried to organize a second line for those who still had a flight to catch. 30 seconds of customer service would have fixed that one.
Second, our flight from O'hare was delayed an hour. No biggie. Would have been nice if someone had announced the gate change but we figured that out ourselves after I got up to evacuate my sinuses and noticed our flight was no longer listed at the counter. Delays happen, most certainly when there's weather problems.
But that's not the gripe. The gripe was that the small plane landed, the passengers debarked, they started boarding us within another five minutes, and it took less than ten minutes to get us settled in. So maybe 20 minutes total. And then we sat for just short of two hours to be deiced in the slow and lazy Chicago snowfall. Not that the plane needed deicing at the time that we could have left. It DID need it after we sat there for almost two hours waiting for the deicing we didn't initially need. Safety is all well and good, but common sense should come into play.
Oh, out of five flights this vacation, three had unannounced gate changes. Is it that difficult to tell the people in the waiting area that they need to go somewhere else to catch the flight?
Just especially grumbly (and whiny, I admit) about it since my sinuses were fighting me to begin with, and then the flights and delays amped it up to crappy levels of irritation.