A Week On Planes
This week has been, in various different ways, a living hell.
The signs were never propitious: two separate trips to two different parts of the country spanning three days and six flights (including connections). The first trip involved driving down to San Jose to catch a flight, then back up from there late the same day; the next trip involved a 5.40am flight out of San Francisco, an overnight stay, a two and a half hour drive and a two-sector flight back from a different airport. When you rack up the things that could potentially have gone wrong, they’re relatively numerous.
In some ways it almost feels like even more things went wrong than I was expecting. I won’t do the whole saga, because it’s just too depressing, but I will cite the joy of turning up at an airport for the flight back (part 1) on Wednesday night to be told it was cancelled and I’d been rebooked for the following day as the point at which I knew this was the worst week of travel ever. And I’ve had some contenders for that prize.
What I will note though is the way this whole process works. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I whiled away time jammed in a middle seat between a large woman on one side and a shockingly smelly man on the other, or waited in airports to see if I would get on to the flight or not.
I think I’ve been spoiled by the fact that so much of my travel is on international routes with carriers like British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, and they just take more time and trouble. The US domestic market is a totally different kettle of fish. Or class of cattle.
To begin with, the way flights are oversold makes no sense to me. Not the fact that it happens - I understand it probably better than most people, because I’ve worked for an airline. But perilously close to twenty years ago when I did so, that airline (it’s the one mentioned above that’s mostly referred to by its initials), already had the practice down pretty much to a science. You could turn up at the start of a shift with a major flight (say the first flight of the day from Heathrow to JFK) looking scarily oversold, and by the time it actually took off there would be a handful of free seats. That was impressive.
US domestic airlines, on the other hand, appear to have eschewed science in favour of the time-honoured method of thinking of a number then doubling it. In the last six weeks I’ve been held unable to “obtain a seat assignment” until the flight closed no fewer than six times, and every one of those flights left people behind (including me once) . I know the scale and complexity is different. I know this. But I still don’t see why it’s so hard.
And when the flights are canceled, as occasionally and inevitably happens, people seem just to lay down and let the airline wheel a baggage trolley over them. When I arrived to find my flight to Minneapolis canceled and that I’d been rebooked for the following day, I had a conversation with the ticket desk guy and he found me an alternative routing on another airline that same day. I was very happy with this service, shook his hand, and have mailed his company to say how pleased I was with his service. Conversely, at the desk next door a couple wheeled an elderly man up because his flight somewhere else had been scrapped, were told to come back the following day (when a seat may be available on a flight), and with a resigned sigh they turned away, saying “we’d better find a hotel for the night then”.
So is that it then? Are US domestic passengers so used to flights being canceled and seats rebooked with no consultation that it’s just regarded as the norm? Because if I turned up for a BA or Virgin flight that had been canceled, I’m fairly sure I’d get a little more explanation and support than that. In fact, I know I would, because I have.
Pam at Pam’s House Blend has an occasional series of posts involving one airline or another screwing up her plans, so I’m trying to work out if it’s unusual enough that it’s worthy of note or so commonplace that it’s more of a “latest chapter in the saga” thing. From her tone, probably the latter.
Please don’t get me wrong. I really do know that running a fleet of ‘planes across a complex hubbing operation like those the US carriers tend to operate is astonishingly complex, and often the things that go wrong (as things inevitably will) are totally outside their control. In this week’s case, huge storms had totally shut down an airport. No one can help that.
But when you pile up the general lack of support or communication, the frequency of (bad) overbooking and the generally terrible level of in-flight service you get on these carriers, an act of god seems like the last nail in the coffin. At least there are a few high quality alternatives, like Virgin America, but their route network is still so limited it’s hard to regard them as a real option for a lot of journeys.
I love flying. I love planes. But it’s getting harder and harder to sustain that enthusiasm of late.