My wife and I went out of town for a family wedding this weekend. Sort of a whirlwind tour—we departed on Sunday morning, went to the wedding, and took a return flight yesterday morning. We stayed here, if you’re interested. Interestingly, the cost was about the same as staying at the nearby Mariott Fairfield. I don’t know about you but all other things being equal I’d rather stay somewhere with a bit of charm than in a place pressed out of a cookie cutter.
I don’t know if I’m just getting old, it was just bad luck, or there’s something in the air. I’m afraid it’s the last. Just about everything was handled incorrectly or incompetently. When we attempt to print out our boarding passes the day before our departure, i.e. as soon as we could, we were shocked to learn that the airline had changed the departure time of our flight from 8:00am to 3:00pm without telling us. They claimed that they had notified us but we had received the notification and rather obviously the notification did not require a response. We scrambled around and were lucky to get a flight to an airport 150 miles from our original destination (75 miles east of where the wedding was to be rather than 75 miles west).
Just about everything else that could have gone wrong did. Meals were incompetently handled. On the return flight we sat on the tarmac for 2 hours waiting to come into the gate (along with 20 other planes), as we were given a series of unlikely excuses for the delay. Just as an example if, as was the case, there are more than a dozen aircraft waiting right along with you and all of the gates you’re taxiing into are visibly empty, there wasn’t a delay at the gate.
But that’s consistent with the systematic incompetence that has surrounded the construction being done on our street. There has been continuous disarray over the period of the last ten months. I can’t tell whether it’s incompetence or “just don’t give a damn”-ation.
Air travel certainly has grown much less pleasant, especially for the infrequent traveler.
I’ve experienced similar “gate delays” many times. When I asked my airline pilot friends about the problem they said if the gates aren’t full then it’s usually a lack of ground staff, who are required to guide the planes in for the last 100 feet or so.
Probably some truth to it, but if everyone looks incompetent, some of it is probably getting older. One of the things I notice as my guys get close to retiring is that skills usually remain pretty good until the end, but the tolerance for BS goes away, often to the point where they become disruptive.
Steve
I always worry that something’s happened to Dave when he hasn’t posted for a while, and unfortunately my fears were founded, he went to New York.
You have no idea. When I first began traveling by air, people dressed to go on the plane, most travel was for business, all cabin service attendants were unmarried women between 18 and 39 who were required to fit comfortably into their highly tailored uniforms, and meals were served on most flights at no extra charge. The seats were larger and farther apart, flights tended to arrive and depart on time, things were much less hurried, and you generally received the impression that the airlines were grateful for your business. Air travel was a gracious, comfortable affair. Now it’s more harried and less comfortable than the Greyhound Bus was.
As to New York, I like New York. I think it is one of the most beautiful states in the union, particularly in the Finger Lakes region where we were. It is no accident it is nicknamed “The Empire State”. It has just about everything.
My suspicion is that the initial problem was a bomb threat, made more credible by the demonstration that was taking place as we landed. I would assume that O’Hare receives a number of bomb threats on a daily basis and although generally they don’t take them seriously this time they did. They just didn’t tell us about it.