Andrew Pollack's Blog
Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise| Professional Services | Second Signal | Presentations | Andrew's Blog | Support |
American Airlines makes a singularly stupid move in the ever escalating "war on customers"
By Andrew Pollack on 05/22/2008 at 12:08 PM EDTIn 1993 when I was just starting to travel frequently on business, my preferred airline was American. Later that year, when my wife and I went to take my first born to Arizona, the gate attendant in Chicago hit is with a $40 on the spot fee for gate checking our stroller. Over the next ten years I spent well over $100,000 on Delta -- most of it in Full Fare Coach, last minute business travel (the highest profit margin seats on the plane).
Welcome to 2008. American has decided that they'll now charge passengers an extra $15 dollars for checking even 1 suitcase that's under 50 pounds. As a result, many will try even harder to stuff everything they own into the evil roller bags. That means longer lines at security, longer boarding times on planes, less space in the overhead compartments, and more passenger injuries from falling suitcases (common in the industry, unfortunately).
Fuel is more expensive. I get that. Raise the ticket prices honestly instead of making up new and interesting ways to bilk passengers.
Corporations do the dumbest things sometimes. I'll bet right now there's an executive somewhere telling travel agents "well, we talked to a lot of other people and they agreed with this decision."
if the shipping ended up making the total cost higher. I suspect the same
behavior may be found in airline ticket buyers.
I'm not saying it's right, just observing that's what happens.
frustrating nightmare. A charge for a seat? any seat? Yup with Air Tran.
Unless you don't select a seat till the day of travel. Add that to the $49
upgrade that was actually $148, lost luggage and rude flight attendents.
Here's one freguent flyer program just cancelled.
Other Recent Stories...
- 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ......
- 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ......
- 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ......
- 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server
- 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned
- 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me!
- 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.
- 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino?
- 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back.
- 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws
talking to the RIGHT people.