United
My family and I traveled from Boston to Los Angeles today, via San Francisco and Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. We got up around 5 a.m. and arrived home at 9 p.m., not adjusting for the time zone change. More than half that time was spent waiting, and the flying time was spent in pain.
It took us 50 minutes to thread through the line at the United terminal in Boston, because only three people were staffing the checked baggage desks for the 300 hundred or so travelers returning from extended holidays.
This was irritating, and a couple of people lost it. Both had made it to the front of the line before they were told they were in the wrong line or that their flight had left without them or something. Both made scenes. We all stood around, swaying slightly and hoping to get out of the line just so we could spend 20 bucks on a bagel and coffee.
In that the airline industry accepts so much money in federal bailouts, it seems that something should be done about First Class, and its opposition to basic American beliefs.
People who scoff at the idea of a nurtured class system in America have not shuffled through the First Class cabin, filled with people who may well have paid upwards of $500 more for their seat than you and who are already seated in seats bigger than yours and being served the better coffee. You meanwhile make your way past them to sit, almost fetally, in a ghetto.
Today I had the option of paying $50 more for five extra inches of legroom. Is there a class action lawsuit available for other people over six feet tall who can only get healthy legroom on a plane if they pay extra? Forget comfort, but shouldn't a passenger's health be standard?
I paid about $1k for three round-trip tickets. First-class passage would have cost at least three times that much. The scam is that none of the passengers gets what he pays for. Extra legroom, priority seating, and a box lunch that you don't have to pay five bucks for is not worth hundreds of extra dollars, but First Class passengers have the satisfaction, at least, of not having to sit with the cattle. Meanwwhile, it amazes me that an airline is so stingy with its "economy" section that getting lunch on a six-hour trip is now optional and getting airline thrombosis is free.
Once in San Francisco, we found that our connecting flight to L.A. had been cancelled. I asked a United representative what my options were, and she said that we had already been scheduled for the 6:30 flight, four hours later.
"Glad I asked," I said, wondering if I'd be typing this from a $10-a-day T-Mobile Hotspot at SFO if I hadn't. "Do you give us a meal voucher?"
"No," she said. "You don't get anything when a flight is cancelled because of weather."
"The weather in L.A. or the weather here?" I asked, thinking there'd been an earthquake down south.
"Here," she said.
Here? It was 50 degrees and clear outside. Ours was the only flight that had been cancelled. I walked away, then thought better of it. I approached another agent and asked for meal vouchers.
"You don't get them when a flight is cancelled due to weather," she said.
"But flights are taking off and landing here as we speak," I said. She then told me our cancelled flight had been inbound from Salt Lake City.
But then she gave me three meal vouchers. I looked at the other arrivals and saw that two planes had arrived recently from Salt Lake City. Our flight had been cancelled because there were only a few people on it; we found this out later when we met other people who had been scheduled on the cancelled flight who showed up for the later one - they were the only other passengers who had been booked on that flight.
"They gave us no apology and they lied to us," one guy said. And I only got $7 meal vouchers after I'd asked a couple of times.
Things could have been worse; the plane might have been hijacked or crashed, it could have been filled with Philadelphia Eagles fans, we might have all had diarrhea. But it's sad that one doesn't get any kind of compensation unless one complains about it, and then the compensation is "worth" about as much as the extra several hundred dollars one might pay for a First Class ticket: nothing. It is the illusion of worth, and it is only valuable when the other option is misery.
The moral is that I need to have someone else buy my plane tickets from now on.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Thursday, January 04, 2007
4 Comments:
"And a new sensation - complete absence of vibration" - I am not flying on Pan-Am anymore. Screw them - I like my vibration.
"No feeling of movement at all. No vibration. Hardly any sound. A new concept in air transportation." - What, am I dead?
At least there ain't no goddamn hippies or darkies on my PanAm flight. If I'm payin' fer first class then I wants my first class. And I'm smokin'. You and the rest of the hoy-palloy can ride with the luggage.
Your harsh look at American mile-high hospitality is searing, mavervorl. America had better wake up!
That video is hilarious. "I'll have more rock lobster tail, please." Today, if you ask for a second bag of honey roasted peanuts, they say "Who you think we is? George Washington Carver? Nigga please!"
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