I know, all the airline fees are the new thing to bitch about. I have just one complaint, for now: I arrived at Atlanta from Dubai and cleared immigration and customs pretty quickly. I had booked my connecting flight to allow for slower progress, and it turned out that there was another flight from ATL-SEA an hour earlier than my originally scheduled flight.
Approach service counter. Seat available? Yep. Is it a middle seat? Nope. Great, I’ll take it… except, that’ll be $50. WTF.
To be sure I don’t know the economics of the airline industry, and I know they’re fucked, generally, and it’s about the worst possible business to be in… but something like that makes me cringe. I actually walked away and then went back 30 seconds later, realizing the positive impact of the change on my capacity to solve some hard problems and get things done for the wedding if I took the earlier flight (an hour doesn’t seem like much, but in this case, in the middle of a 10,000 mile trip home, it is), and so I sucked it up and paid the $50.
I would much rather see them bounce the fares up by, say $5 per seat and not just totally thrash us on fees, but that probably has some stupid but perfectly sound economically correct supply and demand impact.
Blah. Annoying. I want a private jet. I still also want to end global poverty, but I would like to have a private jet while doing it. I contain multitudes.
