News and notes from around the interweb:
- Is free wifi on planes a good thing – or a bad thing? (WaPo) You don’t get charged by an airline for a service, how can that be bad? If you want to unplug, and are fearful of what others will think, just tell them the wifi on your flight wasn’t working.
- 110 checked bags, inside the belly of a plane.
@wheos__ Daily stacking💼✈️ #airpor #travellife #travel #fyp #plane #fypage #viral #ramp #workout #life #timelapse #2023 #foryoupage ♬ Love You So – The King Khan & BBQ Show - American, Spirit and Southwest are all owed money by.. FTX?
- The story of the first aviation mechanic
- Man brought a gun through security, flew and had it noticed on the way back. TSA is being criticized for missing the gun the first time but isn’t the real story that that caught a gun – indeed wouldn’t a 50,% success rate be considered historically quite good?
- Buy premium economy and Delta swaps to an aircraft without premium economy, shouldn’t they upgrade you rather than downgrade you – and not deliver what you paid for?
Absolutely terrible service. You change the plane and loose all the premium seats. Same flight has 15 open delta 1 seats. Red coat refuses to put me in a hugger class seat — I’m relegated to lower class than I paid for. https://t.co/0mZiJtT8Hg pic.twitter.com/QBfJtC8okT
— Tom Opre (@tomopre) January 29, 2023
And that is why, sometimes, they get locked up with the rest of the baggage !!!
Web site is a pita. Does not connect to the article as usual.
Delta has changed my flight when I’ve paid for FC and I’ve suddenly discovered my seat downgraded to not even business.
Fortunately caught it in advance but the phone rep was like, I’m not seeing the problem here.
Sigh
Yeah, it’s hard to stomach the airline’s attitude when they’ve downgraded you. I don’t think those agents ever go anywhere other than in a coach seat; they just don’t seem to get it. However we manage to buy a seat up front … with miles, credits and/or cash, we want that seat. Flying for us is far more meaningful than getting from Point A to Point B. As for being downgraded when there are empty seats up front … that’s an absolutely horrible situation.
The obvious solution is to give the gate agents more power to keep the customers happy. But airlines are caught between a rock and a hard place; it’s a matter of the sheer numbers of agents and trying to write procedures for all of them to follow consistently. A given percentage of the agents are not capable of handling any power and make really dumb decisions, or they don’t handle problems well. So it’s better from the airline’s point to just be hard-ass in their approach to handling the customers. What the airlines need, of course, is a ‘flight manager’ who shows up at the gate an hour before boarding starts. This manager is truly a manager, has proven capability in making proper decisions. S/he is charged with making as many pax happy as possible. Like the Captain is in charge of the airplane, this manager is in charge of the pax until the door closes. It’s only a matter of cost, of course.