News and notes from around the interweb:
- Waiting for ridesharing services at New York LaGuardia has gotten so frustrating that Max Prosperi Uber has opened a mini waiting lounge there with power ports and staff to help contact drivers which under normal circumstances would never be necessary.
Meanwhile taxis and ridesharing has been relegated to the far reaches of the earth at my home airport in Austin, downstairs from the new car rental center, truly terrible to schlep to with luggage.
- More evidence that Qatar Airways CEO Akbar al-Baker is, if nothing else, aviation’s greatest troll. Plastered all American Airlines terminal 8 at New York JFK (which Qatar uses for part of their New York operation):
- I rate this claim false:
- I wasn’t home for Valentine’s Day but I returned to a card from United Airlines. I get the sense though that no matter how promiscuous they may be with such cards that I am likely not one of their Valentines…
- British Midland Regional (‘flybmi’), the part of former Star Alliance member bmi that British Airways didn’t acquire seven years ago, has ceased operations with immediate effect blaming fuel prices and the uncertainty surroundig Brexit.
- Here’s the memo from the Southwest Airlines mechanics’ union in response to the airline’s ‘state of emergency’ which requires mechanics to show up to work in the face of a slowdown.
- Scorpion in the cabin of a Lion Air plane.
I usually take the M60 SBS + subway home from LaGuardia (hard to beat $2.75 for the ride). But always with my wife and luggage, we take a shared Lyft, Uber, or Juno (and we end up getting home in Manhattan in about the same amount of time). And just about every time we use one of the these shared mobility platform (SMP) providers, I end up with a sequence of drivers that take (or are assigned) to my ride, and then some number of minutes later, cancel. At that point my ride is reassigned (or taken) by another driver, and the cycle repeats. Extremely frustrating and inefficient for everyone. The only reason I can think that the SMP managers allow this to continue, is to keep the customer “hanging” onto the hope that their pickup is imminent (so the customer doesn’t cancel and move on to one of the other providers or a taxi or public transportation). From my experience, it seems like all the SMPs do this (at least Uber/Lyft/Juno at LGA and JFK).
A related further annoyance is that sometimes the Lyft driver will text or call me to cancel the ride, which I always politely refuse to do. Why should I get the demerit as a customer rather than the driver that accepted the ride (probably not knowing the destination beforehand) and then decided for some reason that they didn’t really want it?
@SE Rob: please don’t decline these requests “politely.” The drivers know damn well they’re scamming you. Please text or call them back with the most haunting insults you can muster so as to deter these drivers from pulling the scam on others. Protip: guilt trips combined with family and deity references work well. “You bring such dishonor to your family by trying to make a buck from my cancellation fee, shame on you and God is watching.”
Jason: point well made! As I said, my wife is generally present and becoming a sailor with Tourettes is not an option – she holds me to a higher standard. But your protip seems right on the money! Bravo!