Licensed to steal
The airlines have a helluva racket going, don't they?
My friend was supposed to join me in Boston, but she got sick and can't come. So I called the airline to see what could be done about her ticket. Answer?
Well, she has a year to use the ticket - a year from the day it was bought, of course, not the day it was issued for. So there's a month gone from that year - and it makes my having bought insurance for my big vacation in April, the ticket for which I bought back in September, look like a very good decision.
Second, while she can fly anywhere, not just to Boston, if the trip she chooses costs more than the face value of the Boston trip, she has to pony up the difference (that's actually reasonable). But if it costs less ... she loses the difference.
And either way she has to pay $150 "change fee". Which is a fee for sweet damn-all.
It's a racket. Pure and simple, a racket.
Labels: miscellaneous
6 Comments:
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At 8:11 AM, November 19, 2010
Mark had this to say...
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At 8:22 AM, November 19, 2010
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 11:19 AM, November 19, 2010
Mark had this to say...
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At 2:05 PM, November 19, 2010
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 2:22 PM, November 19, 2010
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 1:18 PM, November 20, 2010
Anonymous had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->And these days, even under the best of circumstances, airline travel is so unpleasant that I don't see why anyone would travel by air unless it was absolutely necessary. I can't stand it. I just wish this country was as advanced as some others, like in Europe or China, where train travel was possible (I mean in places other than the Northeast).
The very first time I flew was kind of exciting. For the next thirty odd years it was just boring. Then, when no one could go the gate with you, it also become tedious. Now it's all that and also aggravating and a colossal time suck. But if there's no train (next time I come to Boston I will seriously consider it - question is will my employer accept the extra time?) There's not much choice. And even if there is, spending days to get from one coast to the other frequently isn't an option.
Yeah, train travel in this county is a joke. I once looked into taking the train from Atlanta to Denver. It involved one leg to DC and another to Chicago, with long layovers in both places. It would have taken about three days to do it, it was at least as expensive as airfare (probably more), and way more inconvenient. Driving would have taken less time and been cheaper.
I did take one trip by train from Santa Fe NM to Los Angeles. I had a cabin. It was an overnight trip with only a few long delays, but I arrived in LA feeling like I had had a good night's sleep at home. If the US were willing to work on it, train travel could be viable. Sure, there wouldn't be any one-day trips to the other coast, but maybe most people don't really need to take a one-day trip to the other coast, even for business purposes. We have just gotten used to being able to do it so we think its' necessary more often than it really is.
I use the train from NY to DC (and NY to Phila) all the time, and never bother flying for those trips. But DC to Boston isn't really practical. It's a long train ride (at least 8 hours, sometimes more, depending upon delays, unless you take the Acela, and even then it's 6.5 hours), and it's way more expensive than flying the regular shuttle flights.
A few years ago, I had to give a talk at Linux World, then be at meetings in the DC area for the next two days. I thought about using the train. It turned out that the leg from Boston to DC alone would cost almost as much as the whole flight itinerary, LGA to BOS to DCA to LGA (for which I paid just over $200).
On the original post: welcome to deregulation. The problem is that things have changed since we deregulated the airlines, and even if we should regulate them the way we used to, the lobbyists now would make sure that the new regulations let them continue all these abuses.
They will, of course, tell you that you knew the rules when you bought the ticket. (Me, I think someone should make sure these people can't reproduce.)
On the other hand, I fly a lot, and just got back this noon from Beijing. I actually don't find flying to be that unpleasant. Part of it, I think, is relaxing and not letting things upset one. I very seldom have a truly bad experience.
Sure I knew it when I bought the ticket. But what's the alternative? And when the time on the plane is an hour and ten minutes, and in the airport is two and half hours, something's wrong
As I learned earlier this year, even if one knows the terms and conditions of an airline ticket, what they mean is not always what a reasonable person might assume.
I had booked a round-trip ticket from the Netherlands to Canada. As it happened, I ended up having to postpone an earlier trip to Canada (because of Eyjafjallajökull), and so when the time came for me to fly from Amsterdam to Montréal, I was already in Montréal, and so I didn't use the outbound flight on my ticket. I was still counting on using the return flight to get back, though. So I was rather alarmed when I got an automated e-mail informing me that the status of my ticket had been changed to "cancelled." I phoned the airline, and they told me that because no changes were allowed on my ticket, my missing the first flight had invalidated the whole thing. Then they offered to sell me a one-way ticket for something on the order of five thousand dollars.
In the end, it worked out okay—I was able to use the return flight from the earlier trip, which could be rescheduled because (a) it had been affected by the volcano directly rather than indirectly, and (b) it was on a different (less draconian!) airline. (It was a little complicated, because it wasn't returning from where I was actually going to be, so I had to buy a ticket on yet another airline to meet up with it. But it was much better than having to buy another ticket to Amsterdam.)
So, yeah. Licence to steal pretty much sums it up.
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