Travel: What Will They Think of Next?

One thing I like about air travel is how things are always changing. I suppose it could be – can be – unsettling, and stressful, and make you feel stupid when you don’t know how things work. But watching new technologies, policies, and approaches discovered, tested, rolled out, and sometimes rejected or surpassed is also entertaining. Especially if you frequent a variety of airlines and airports, you might not have the same experience twice. You can’t predict it.

Earlier this spring a security person asked me to walk through this sort of tunnel thing that shot out poufs of air at the customer. What was that for? I had no idea.

While many of my flights these days have no “entertainment” system at all, Saturday’s offered quite a bit of variety, and included access to wireless internet. I was too cheap to lay out $12.95 for a three-hour flight, but it was nice to know I could.

I feel a bit sorry for the airlines; do you? They still struggle to give us the same kind of rates we paid a decade or two ago. This time my goal was a round-trip trip to Florida for less than $300, and I had no problem getting it. Staying in business and pulling this off pushes the industry into a desperate and sometimes confusing mix of cutting corners and adding (billable) services.

So Delta charged me $15 for my bag, each way, and tried to sell me food, as well as the movies and wireless access. (Was it that long ago that dinner and a movie were included as a matter of course, on a flight of this type?)

To my surprise, Delta once again offers free peanuts; unusual not because they are free, but because so many have turned to pretzel-like substances instead. Seems like every other kid is deathly allergic to peanuts. (When and why did that happen?)

Some of my recent flights charged for disposable headphones (on top of the charge to watch movies). And all blankets and pillows had been removed in favor of a “sleep kit” you could acquire, for a price of course.

Nobody offered to cover the additional $80 in expenses incurred when my 2000-mile trip ended up taking 30 hours instead of six. I’m a bit embarrassed to try to reimburse it from the people from our headquarters in Orlando who paid for my ticket. So maybe I’ll just consider it a personal expense.

In the unlikely event that you are a glutton for travel details, here's what happened: On Friday my flight was rerouted to Savannah by storms in Atlanta. We spent a couple hours in the airport there before they could get us back to the big city. Most of many of us missed connections and were re-booked on flights for late afternoon the next day, so I found a random hotel. On Saturday my flight loaded and made it to the runway, then turned back with a mechanical problem that required us to change planes; we left about two hours late. Delta’s problem? Or the Atlanta airport's? Or just an act or two of God? At any rate, Delta was taking no credit for any of these snafus, and offered no vouchers or compensation or complimentary toothbrushes, just the cheerful, “We hope you’ll fly with us again!”