at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)
Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:
In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan to do what I can to help solve that problem. (This after ten years of using United as my primary airline; I’m a “Premier Executive” frequent flyer, which means >50,000 actual air miles per year.)
Lufthansa treated me similarly on July 26. In fact, that experience was every Internet-enabled traveler’s nightmare: online e-ticket, check-in, boarding pass in hand,
Sorry, guys, this is the way they all do it now. Denver is particularly bad, because, along with the enormous distances you have to run, they keep changing the gates. But the other airlines have their little games too.
You can run but you can’t hide.
I had a similar problem with Lufthansa: travelling with partner, e-tickets for two, checked in, I’m waved through at the gate but partner is refused for not having a paper ticket. The staff were actively hostile to our very polite attempts to resolve the situation. I was genuinely worried one or both of us would be hauled off by security.