I can't agree more. I was once catching a flight, went to my gate and found no one there and the flight status monitors saying "Cancelled". I couldn't find an agent at any desk, so went back out of security to check-in to figure out what was going on. The agent proceeded to act like I was the biggest idiot in the world for leaving the gate because "we don't control those boards, your flight isn't cancelled, the gate was changed". So I had to run back through security to barely catch my flight.
Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
Ugh, the industry still needs to do so much work to this end. There are good shops out there, fwiw, but the elitism is real. Totally counterproductive for a means of conveyance that is so elegantly classless (in the positive, egalitarian sense).
I design and build things 100x[0] more complex than any bicycle, yet I don't know the jargon and feel like an idiot when I got into my local bike shop to ask simple questions. They are mostly nice and understanding, but the jargon and elitism is still very real that my wife doesn't like going there.
[0]though adjusting the tension spring on the brake levers still puzzles me sometimes... Looser should mean it travels more when you squeeze and release the brake lever, right? Stiffer spring has less displacement for a given force. Not quite. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/canti-direct.html#parallel
There was a focused effort to "professionalize" the hobby by researcher (crank) John Forester. Thousands of cyclist deaths can be attributed to his efforts, which included promoting "serious" cycling over accessible and casual transport, and personally destroying early plans for widely-available bike lanes in California a la in the Netherlands. Though not as infamous, you can think of him as a mini Moses.
I bought my wife's bike, which she'd purchased back in England while on a fitness kick, to a local shop in Manhattan for a brake service years ago. I have never forgotten the interaction: the hipster douche who greeted me launched into a multi-minute tirade about how Decathlon was "ruining cycling in Europe" and how I was complicit in doing the same in the USA by bringing this abomination into his store.
I'm pretty sure I know who is more responsible for ruining cycling.
Fortunately my local shop in the suburbs here couldn't be more different. They're patient and lovely with my kids, efficient and non-condescending with my wife, will even send a little car to your house to collect a broken bike for service - whether or not they sold it.
Speaking about elitism/classless - in some german towns, there are more and more non profit self help bike repair places. Good concept I think, but sadly not for E-Bikes it seems. At least I was told that much, so I had to start getting my own repair gear.
Most of them live and breathe biking. They choose to make close to minimum wage to "do what they love", they don't own the store. I think it's genuine excitement and enthusiasm that you take as elitism. Often, it's a big part of their identity... "how could anyone else _not_ care as much"?
I used to bike with a few bike shop employees and they were only in it to eke out a living doing something adjacent to the thing they love, selling bikes was not their passion, riding them and talking about the tech was.
At least 10 years ago, wages in the whole sector were pretty low, so you'd only work there if you really wanted to and valued perks like buying bikes at wholesale (hey, that's half off) and having access to tools or a mechanic buddy.
I'm very familiar with the type of people you're talking about and they're not the elitists I'm talking about. There's a separate segment that, while they may also live and breathe biking, use their specialist knowledge to gate-keep and make people not on their level (customers) feel "less than". It's very shortsighted, because independent bike shops can't afford to be turning off customers- these kind of experiences push people to corporate shops (e.g. Trek), which at least have formalized oversight/training in how to treat customers.
Catering exclusively to snobbery is everywhere in commissioned sales.
The only bike shops that aren't this way are going to be relatively small and new establishments where the owner is the only guy there. Do not expect the advice or inventory to be all that great.
If you just want the advice, catch the salesman that he's eventually forced to hire when they're off work at the bar.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shop
This is my personal favorite story about bike shops (from circa 2008).
At the time, I both lived and worked in Manhattan. I was lucky that biking was an option for commuting but the only bike I had was a 20 year old Giant Acapulco (not a fancy bike at all).
I worked down in Tribeca and one day on the way to work my shifters just broke. Thankfully, there was a bike shop near work so I dropped of the bike in the morning and said I would be back that afternoon.
Fast forward to the afternoon and I come in to pick up my bike (as I assumed it was an easy fix and they would just charge me). The repair counter guy looks at my ticket, checks something and says he has to go get the manager. This is somewhat confusing as this was a simple fix or repair.
The manager comes out and several of the staff are arrayed behind him. Now I'm a mixture of concerned and fascinated as to what could possibly have happened to my bike given this deployment of bike shop personnel.
Manager: "Sir, the repair for your shifters is going to cost $40"
Me: "Ok, is there an issue with that?"
Manager: "Well, a quality used bike would cost you about $60 so we weren't sure how you would want us to proceed"
(I should add that the staff behind him all seemed as though they were holding their breath here).
Me: "That's cool. I'm good with the repair"
Everyone visibly relaxed, the manager turned around, pointed at one guy, then turned back to me and said "Your bike will be ready tomorrow."
My only thought on this level of nervousness is due to the shop being near a lot of investment bank offices that had a very type A guys who were also into bike racing. I myself dealt with a lot of those folks so it's not hard to imagine the shop staff assuming I would be that way too.
I had in internship in San Francisco and had a ~$100 bike. My bike seat and post were stolen one day. I didn't know anything about the "levels" of bikes shops, so I just went to the nearest one. Turned out to be extremely high end, probably not a single bike under $5k. The guy I talked to was so helpful, rummaged around there storage room for 20 minutes, and found me a used seat & post they had down there and just charged me $10.
I had an older/seemingly quite skilled bike mechanic look at my bike, who was happy to deal with my vague gestures about squeaky doohickeys and answer any questions. They knew enough to know what normal people don’t know, though, and how to get from there to what matters.
I think the sort of lingo-centric scoffing “expertise” is a defensive posture that near-novices tend to take, to scare off further questions. You see it in every field, and we should all be careful not to replicate it in our own.
sadly, the best way to get data on flights it to use the airlines app - not anything you'd find at the airport
also, it's easiest to use that same app for the boarding pass too these days
once I printed them out (with the provided pdf) thinking it would be easier, the printed paper didn't work and they said I HAD to install and use the app or go back to a kiosk and use one of their printouts and lose my place in line...)
Oh the last minute gate change is always ridiculous. I never find it happens at really busy airports either. It's always at the airports that have around 40 gates but only around 6 flights an hour.
I dislike the sense of judgment from TSA officials when I don’t correctly predict which items they do/don’t want me to put in the tray. It’s not my fault that different airports seem to have completely different rules for the same items.
I've often thought that having a standardized checklist on a big board in the security line would be a big help.
Laptops: In/Out
Liquids: In/Out
Shoes: On/Off
Etc
Because yeah, it's really annoying getting treated like I'm the dummy by some agent that's only ever known this airport's rules... because this airport has rules entirely different than every other one I've flown through in this decade.
Recently had to fly with some splints and crutches and stuff and that was a whole extra set of fun difference in airport rules. First one really wanted to rub their explosives swab on my finger that was held together by exposed metal pins and had exposed subcutaneous tissue. They were a bit put off when I asked for alternate options.
My first act as a TSA agent would be to beg, borrow, or steal a whiteboard for this purpose. They seem very content to explain it to every passenger almost individually though. Which of course slows everything down as someone has to ask every minute whether an iPad is a big or small device. I wonder if there's some weird bureaucracy rule that prevents them from writing their own signs.
Doesn’t work. I was in a queue at SXF airport once. Everybody in the queue passed at least 5 whiteboard-sized posters explaining in detail that you need a 1 litre bag and what’s supposed to go in there. Also, what things you need to present at the check. Those same posters lined the walls of the hall. Yet basically every second person acted completely surprised when the security officer asked for their 1 litre bag. It’s as if those people forgot their brain at home and were all on autopilot.
Might be in part because multiple times I've seen signs/poster etc only good the agent to contradict it once you get there, adding or removing requirements. So you stop trusting it.
A whiteboard I might trust because it was likely handwritten that morning
Usually airports use signs with both graphics and text for this. Removes the ambiguity unless you mistake the image of a bag for the tray and vice versa.
Which leaves me confused with GP's suggestion. Every TSA line I've been in already has these signs. Are airports in other countries worse about their signage than TSA?
There was zero signage at the last few American airports I flew through. Four airports in 2 weeks and they all had different rules, and felt the need to yell at you for not knowing their nuances.
To me, it's not even about having different rules (which itself is stupid). It's the constant annoyed yelling. Like, can you at least pretend you don't hate yourself, the general public, and your job, for the duration of your shift?
If I worked retail and treated customers like the TSA treats passengers, I'd be fired the first day.
- Belt/Watch: leave in unless it has enough metal to trip the metal detector, then take off but we’ll yell at you for holding up the line/losing your pants.
Also: here’s a list of things we are constitutionally not allowed to require, but if you choose to opt out you have a random 1:1 chance of being selected for an invasive “enhanced” screening.
Also: here’s where you can pay your bribe^H^H^H^H*Hfee to be prescreened so the whole process is easier for you unless we decide we you should be on the list that we randomly select for “enhanced” screening. Then your children get to watch a large man put his hands all over your body in ways that they’ve been told to never let a stranger touch you. And if you speak up, we’ll do it you your minor children too.
Reading here the x-ray machine model or type might be a true technical reason why there are seemingly always different rules. Even same airport, different terminal canbe different due to different build year and machines.
What I don't understand is why people simply don't pay attention? By the time it's my turn I have seen the 3-10 people in front of me go through the motions, so I naturally preempt and prepare based on what I have observed. Not a guarantee for no issues but a solid step to not mess up completely.
One time, a TSA official told me "never take off your watch in an airport unless you want to lose it" -- which is how I learned that you can wear your watch through the metal detector just fine, which I've now done dozens of times.
Until a few weeks ago when a another TSA official berated me for thinking I could walk through a metal detector wearing a watch...
Proximity is the issue. If the watch or bracelet wrist is very physically close to the detector, it will set it off.
You're supposed to the watch/bracelet, but you do have to hold your wrist close to your body. You kind of want to hold your hands in front of your body as if you're about to grab one of your wrists with your other hand.
Watches and other jewelry are basically right at the cutoff of detection. They want to detect small knives but not earrings.
This is all absolutely tribal airport knowledge. I had been traveling for work for years, taken hundreds of flights, but I only found this out when my partner tried to go through a metal detector with a semi-permanent bracelet that requires a small screwdriver to take off, and the TSA person mercifully told her exactly how to pose as she walked through the detector.
I just put my watch, wallet, phone and other loose or pocket belongings in my backpack or jacket that's already going in the tray. No chance of losing anything.
My wife and I just habitually empty our hands and pockets into the bin.
Most recent flight we took, she couldn't find her passport for the extra security check right before the gate. It took us about half an hour to get around to having the security open up the (now closed) bag scanner, which lo and behold, had somehow eaten her (securely places in the bin) passport. The tech was shaking his head, saying "See, this is why you don't put your passport loose in the bin" as if that's a normal thing everyone already knows specifically to avoid.
I was told this about my passport and wallet once. Then the other day asked if I could keep a tissue in my pocket and was told to put it in the tray. I think it depends on the scanners (if you’re going through a metal sector it’s fine, if its one of the more fancy scanners they need everything off your person.
Even different lines in the same security area can have different rules. If you travel a lot you start to recognize which machines require laptops out of bags and which don't, for instance.
It is really anxiety inducing overall though. Not to mention the ritual of getting partly undressed before the stupid thing then trying to put everything back on and in pockets on the other side.
TSA PreCheck means I don't have to worry about those rules. Completely worth it. I haven't taken off my shoes, belt, taken out my laptop or liquids in a decade.
Except sometimes the TSA precheck and regular lines are the same and they give you this little placard that sometimes a guy behind the conveyor belt will agree means you don't need to take off your shoes and belt...
I've experienced this at non-US airports where the x-ray at the entrance asks for different things to be in the tray than the x-rays before boarding. It's impossible to keep track of what goes where.
Even at the same airport they can’t seem to get it right amongst themselves. Recently had one TSA person yelling at me to keep something in my bag and then the next person down the line yelling at me for having it in my bag.
When I pointed to the other agent and said “your friend over there told me to do the opposite, that’s why it’s in there!” they just sort of scowled at me.
I just smiled and went about my day, but yes the TSA is often just a total dumpster fire. Some folks are very nice but too many of their folks have a giant chip on their shoulder about something.
> When I pointed to the other agent and said “your friend over there told me to do the opposite, that’s why it’s in there!” they just sort of scowled at me.
Recent fun experience in Amsterdam:
security line was moving veeeery slowly. Almost every bag got flagged for inspection. As I’m waiting for my bag to get checked, I see two agents briefly mutter in each others ears. One of them walks up to the lady manning the xray machine, taps her on the shoulder, says something in her ear and they swap places. He goes on xray machine, she start checking bags.
Almost every bag after that passed the xray test. Line started moving quickly
My personal positive experience in English speaking country (but not US or UK obviously) was the staff said that passengers don't need to take out stuff from hand luggage for security scanning because they have "the new kind of machines" although the machines didn't look exactly new.
The “new” machines are more like a CAT scanner vs just a 2D x-ray so they allow for easier examination of bag contents and more insight on the composition of materials.
I used to travel for work. 100ish flight segments a year all over the country, typically carrying two laptops - corporate and client.
In one airport, I had a TSA agent yell at me that I'm not allowed to bring two laptops through precheck in my bag. That they had to go through separately. I complied but asked if that was this airport's policy because no other airport seemed to care. She swore up and down that this was national TSA policy and I should know better if I flew so much.
When I look at the TSA's success rates in audits, I tend to agree with the claim that it is more a government jobs program than a security agency.
And, to be clear, it's a crappy job. Get up ungodly early to travel to a work site in the middle of nowhere to shepherd thousands of jumpy/tired strangers* through arcane procedure (possibly in a language that they don't exactly have a firm grasp of) in the hopes of catching the one-in-a-million who has shown up specifically with the intent to kill you and as many other people as possible (or so your training says).
All while gaining basically no transferrable skills.
*Also, a significant portion of these strangers are headed to destinations and experiences you could never dream of affording or having the opportunity to access.
There’s a fundamental issue with people, which is that it’s difficult to treat masses of people as separate individuals.
After the 20th time you ask someone to take out their laptop, there’s a part of you that’s screaming, “we’ve done this 20 times, you should know this by now!” Of course, “we” haven’t done this 20 times, only one side of the interaction has the repeated experience. But it’s natural to project that onto the other person, and get into a mode of, “I’ve told you before.”
Obviously this can be overcome, I'm not sure TSA hires people with enough self awareness to even see the problem.
Isn’t this the point? To destabilize you, put you on your back foot, make you feel preemptively guilty and a little angry, to feel the presence of an Authority?
The point is to be seen to be doing something, so that the nervous public sees that Something is being Done, and so that politicians can say they did all they could the next time there’s an attack. Anything they actually do is very much secondary.
And annoyingly, the real, meaningful things they do do aren't sexy.
Reinforced cockpit doors are basically invisible, but they've also basically made hijackings impossible, especially when coupled with the fact that passengers will no longer assume the plane will safely land and negotiate.
This is one of my major pet peeves, and it extends well beyond TSA. Help desks, call centers, car rentals... Essentially, it's when someone expects you to be able to do their job. When you invariably don't, they treat you as if you're stupid.
This has some lessons that apply much more broadly than to just airports (e.g. apps that make you jump through hoops and expect you to know what 2fa or SSO mean)
Airport jobs are some of the worst possible jobs - poor pay, bad hours, very long effective commutes (when you consider that they don't clock in until after get to the terminal, get through security), and angry customers screaming at you for something that's not your fault.
Lazy/incompetent/annoyed employees is the inevitable outcome of such an environment
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s minimum wage for the location. Doesn’t matter if they earn more than a highly skilled professional in a different country, it doesn’t change the skill set.
FWIW though, I rarely had bad experiences with airport staff. They are just trying to do their jobs in a hectic place and don’t intentionally make our lives difficult.
That it's a near minimum wage job is not actually the fact though. Even the minimum starting salary for an entry level TSA position is higher than the highest minimum wage of any city/county/state in the US. The median TSA salary is also a hair above the median of full time salary in the US.
For the most part I agree most are at least neutral though. I.e. they are there because it's a job, not because they hate people or love people and this job was the way to do that. It's just the ones that do tend to really stand out for people.
TSA are not general workers, they're not the subject of this thread. We mean baggage loaders, ticket booth operators, the people managing the boarding, etc. They're making about as much as they could've made in Amazon warehouse. So their attitude is about the same as at Amazon warehouse. And for their employers, that's okay because it's not like they're going to lose any business due to bad customer service. Commercial flying is the worst it's ever been, and yet there are more passengers than ever before.
In addition to the minimum wage they get paid, it's also the minimum (negative) value they add. There's zero reason to do better at a job that already is a waste of almost everyone's time.
They do add some value, but not those inside the terminal, except the nice people behind the check in counter and the curb luggage assistants (captains?) that will take your luggage, give you the boarding pass, and off you go? Golden. It seems they do well on tips. It's worth every $10-20 bucks or whatever it is now.
It is when you get to the security is where you meet the UpsideDown. Condescending, most all of them, ime.
Yes, exactly. But actually, given what they must be paid they do an admirable job. I can’t truly blame someone for not giving a shit, it’s just frustrating for me when getting on my flight depends on them doing so.
Everyone you interact with from the moment you enter the airport has that Brooklyn-diner-employee “whaddayawaaaant?” attitude. Like your very presence as a customer annoys them. Everyone is in dire need of customer service training. The DMV is more pleasant.
Look, our culture does not reward excellence, so those people are doing the least possible to not get fired. That's kind of the whole American thing in general at this point. Nobody is doing great outside of technology workers, and even then, only some of them. You're not going to have a great experience in general from people here. There are always outliers, but those are individuals who have found some internal motivation to go above and beyond, and it's not a systemic thing.
This is not a US-only airport staff issue. I am on the road most of the last three decades and it is international. It is one, binding "quality" in every country. Most the airport staff's core competency rests elsewhere in almost all airports.
I am hedging because i have had nuggets of exceptional service and support here and there, even in nightmarish hellscapes like Heathrow. Flight attendants are a whole different area of joy and fears...
Last time I flew, it was with United and I highly recommend their app. Clearly designed by people who know airports suck. It automated everything, from checkin and tickets, kept me updated on flights and gates, mapped them out and told me how long it would take to get to the gate and where security lines were the longest. Even tracked my checked luggage.
Not a big fan of having to load up an app to do something that should be (an in some cases, used to be) effortless. At some airlines, the gate agents are now starting to expect you to use the app for things, and they'll give an annoyed snort if you ask them for information. Sorry, Tiffany, but your airline app doesn't work on my phone because United's lazy software engineers cut off support for Operating Systems older than the previous version.
Which would be great if it was actually accurate. Took a United flight two days ago. Checked two bags. App only reported one bag loaded onto plane. Spent the flight anxiously wondering if the other bag had been lost. Both bags arrived fine.
I'd rather have no information than unreliable information.
Put an airtag into literally every bag you check. Helps you figure out not just whether they made it on the flight, but also if they ended up at some baggage claim on the other end of the airport instead of the one they were supposed to be at
maybe this doesn't work in every airport but you can hold up your phone with the camera on, point it down the hallway, and get step by step directions to get to your gate.
Usually the rule is that the personal item must fit under the seat in front of you, the carry-on may be a bit larger.
I have boarded with a wheeled carry-on + wheeled personal item (a backpack with wheels) in the past, but every time the gate agent tested the personal item for size.
I'm sure that's technically true -- but as long as your personal item doesn't have wheels they seem completely unconcerned with the size. I frequently travel with a duffel bag carry-on that goes in the overhead. On most flights they let me waltz onto the plane with it and a backpack long after they start forcing everyone to gate check their rollerboards.
They could also just say "only one carry-on can go in the overhead bin."
The specific rule is that a personal item must be able to fit under the seat in front of you, in that space, without any sort of extension into the aisle.
At most gates, I've seen the little boxes that are used to size test carry on luggage to also have a section to size test personal items.
My experience is that it barely fits a large backpack with some books, snacks, and at least one 15 inch laptop.
Carry on luggage can be much, much larger.
> I frequently travel with a duffel bag carry-on that goes in the overhead
Yes, that is one carry on luggage item, and one personal item.
>They could also just say "only one carry-on can go in the overhead bin."
No because you are not afforded two carry on luggage items. One item has to be small enough to fit under the seat in front of you.
A couple of weeks back I was flying out of Chicago O'Hare. The guy in front of me had a carryon suitcase, a laptop bag, and a fanny pack attached to the carryon. The employee checking us in told him that the fanny pack was considered a second personal item. He had to remove it from the bag and wear it on him. Then it became part of his attire and that was A-OK.
That is the most counter-intuitive thing for me while flying. Why make me pay to check my bag? Make people pay to carry on a bag. Most of the time boarding and leaving a plane is taken up with people dealing with overhead bags. Checking a bag should be the cheapest option to incentivize people to be more efficient.
If checking the bag is free, everyone would do it, leaving the overhead space empty. That overhead space is flying to the destination anyway, so it’s better to make sure it’s full. The. If there’s free space in the hold underneath, they can transport other things like cargo (which makes them money).
My best guess is that at least some airports will charge the airlines per checked in bag. Thus to save money if possible people carrying them inside is most profitable.
Most flights on busy, small planes, where most passengers are wheeling chunky rollboards up, will offer complementary gate check for larger carry on bags. Often you can actually check such a bag for free at the bag check counter before security - even if your ticket does not include any checked baggage.
Yes, I know, that's what I described. So why not a fee for carry-on - the actual limited resource on such a plane - and a free small checked bag to be efficiently and cheaply shepherded from the entrance all the way to the destination by staff and machines specialized to that?
This also allows me to actually plan for what I need on the plane versus what I don't, instead of an at-gate shuffle of medications and charger blocks from one bag to another.
My point is that that is the service you are getting from regional/express airlines these days. Some of them offer ‘personal item only’ basic tickets which means ‘carry ons’ are extra; and de facto ’carry ons’ are actually checked bags, because everyone knows they are going to offer complementary gate check – and it turns out you can in fact often just check the bag for free at check in. And of course this allows you to pack things in that bag that can go in the hold, but that you wouldn’t be allowed to take through security, like standard size toiletry bottles.
What’s weird is, I agree, the way it’s described and marketed. Carry on add-ons should be sold as ‘small checked bag’. As it is, if you know your carry on is going to be gate checked it’s easy to plan where you pack your lithium battery devices; if you don’t you’ll be doing the gate check shuffle.
A lot of the constraints in how airlines can market service levels are imposed by the ticketing aggregation standards and how fares show up in searches. There are also issues with creating differences in luggage standards between regional and long haul flights because of through ticketing.
It’s probably more complicated than it looks from the outside, and all falls into the same problem of overall air travel inscrutability caused by the ‘it makes sense to the people who are in it but looks Byzantine from outside’ problems the original article here is complaining about.
One of the best investments I ever made was the original Patagonia MLC wheelie. It stands for Maximum Legal Carry-on. They have a black hole version now which I am not familiar with but I assume is the same quality / usefulness. I had a few jobs where I commuted regularly on CRJ 200's and this bag fits in the overhead with no issue. The ability to pop out the straps and wear it like a backpack makes the gate agents much less concerned about the size.
One time in 2013 I was flying from San Francisco to Phoenix with a layover in LA. I purchased my ticket directly from United, the flights had a UAXXXX flight number, and the printed tickets I got when I checked in had United branding on them.
I got to LAX and I proceeded to try to find my UA flight, but the flight number was nowhere to be found. I waited a bit and when it still didn’t show up on the monitor, I asked a gate agent. The agent looked at my ticket and told me to keep waiting.
Eventually I started to get worried as my departure time was approaching. I asked another gate agent, and this time I was informed my flight was not a United flight at all! It was a US Airways flight. Also, it was in a completely different terminal. Also, at LAX to move between terminals you have to exit security and hike across parking structures and parking lots. There was no way I would make my flight.
I looked at my ticket and sure enough, in small print it said “operated by US airways.” I hadn’t even noticed this, but even if I had, how was I supposed to know that this meant it was literally not a United flight at all?
Thankfully a friendly customer service agent took mercy on me and got me booked on an American flight later that day.
I later learned from a flight attendant friend that this was called a “code share” and it was subsequently changed to make it more user friendly.
There are a million things like this I don’t even think about anymore because I travel so much. But when I think back to those days of early adulthood I remember how stressful and confusing airports could be.
In Lexington, KY I was chided for taking out my laptop "You don't need to do that" and then at Dallas Fort Worth I got chided for not taking out my laptop. Kafkaesque is the best word I have to describe it. Turns out Lexington has nicer/newer scanners and somehow I'm supposed to know which scanners you need to take your laptop out for.
Additionally I want to make a scene every time I hand over documents and get told "I don't need this" since if I hadn't provided that ID/Passport/Boarding pass there was an equal chance I'd get berated for not providing it. There is zero empathy for the traveller. If I walk forward I get yelled at, if I wait to be called I get yelled at, it's infuriating. Everything about the airport feels like a lose-lose scenario to me.
I don't fly that often and every time I do I hate the airport experience so much because I feel like I'm constantly doing _something_ wrong.
The security theater of the TSA is just the moldy cherry on top of the shit sundae that is flying.
I'm pretty sure this is a purposeful "feature" of security at least for North America. They don't want anyone getting comfortable with the process and constantly make changes to ensure this. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish other than to make air travel less comfortable.
I recently flew and the airport had gotten the new scanners since the last time I had gone somewhere. The signage was confusing as only some of the lines had signs that specifically said you didn't have to take out your electronics on "this lane only". Even with the new scanners they were pulling out half the bags for additional screening and only had one person doing the additional screening.
Coming back from overseas I saw how it was supposed to work, walked up and they directed me to a line and a specific bin loading station, had someone remind me to ensure my pockets were empty, walked through the scanner and my bag was already waiting for me, took all of 2 minutes.
Lexington KY is a small airport, I walked right up to an empty line with no one in front of me and there were only 2-3 people in front of my at DFW and no one had a laptop I guess?
The entire airport experience is me trying to watch the people in front of me and try to decipher what I need to do to comply best. I still feel like a fish out of water every time.
Everything you’re saying is how I feel as a native English speaker and it drives me absolutely nuts. People in airports are obsessed with telling you what you can’t do.
The one thing that kind of works for me is, “Well, what should I do?” when they bark orders about what I can’t do.
“You can’t have your boarding pass in your hand!”, when you’re in the x-ray. “Where should I put it now?”
Oh well, it turns out I actually can have it in my hand. Thanks.
Yes, this is a thing too. It's confusing for people who don't fly often for the obvious reasons, but experienced travelers have it just as bad because the rules vary wildly by airport and country.
I can't remember which airports/countries/systems require which procedures, so I just have to go in blind every time.
Navigation in a lot of public places is pretty bad. I think interactive maps on small terminals could help a lot. Personally, I find it much easier to understand things from a map, especially when it shows exactly where you are.
This shouldn't really be directed at people who work at the airport. Almost everything mentioned is the fault of the people who designed the airport and the people who run the airport.
The latter group are so, so happy that you addressed the former, and not them. They have successfully avoided the inconvenience and scrutiny that would prompt them to change. (Of course, between Abe and the UHC guy, taking your complaints directly to an executive also seems to be effective, if not even more so.)
Agree 100. Most of my frustration with things in the world goes right to this IE it's the folks who design/administer it that I blame. Sure, the users and/or operators of any given system can find a way to use/operate things incorrectly. But, so many things are just clearly lazy in design. And, n=1 here, in many cases having worked in service/retail/operations roles, it's usually a matter of decision makers not listening to folks that have to work around the sillyness day to day that is to blame. So long as the front line folks work around it, the decision makers consider it solved...
If someone works at the airport and is screaming at people with limited English proficiency who rarely fly, that is the fault of the rude employee. They should get a different job.
It’s a customer facing role where the main responsibility is directing confused and anxious people.
How about two different planes departing to exactly the same destination at exactly the same time from two different terminals? That's how I missed my plane from Belgrade to Vienna. I have no other explanation but that they do it on purpose.
The airport departure board doesn't have flight numbers? All the ones I've seen do. And if you can't notice the difference between two different flight numbers, how are you going to notice the difference between one flight departing at 1:35 and another that departs at 1:45?
During the ongoing redevelopment of Belgrade airport I did find myself with a short connection there and unable to find a departure board. I checked the airport website, but it only had the flight names and not gates!
Beginning to get worried and with no-one to talk to in the construction site of an airport I discovered that I needed to rotate my phone and then the extra columns appeared on their website. Yes I had tried scrolling and zooming, but in portrait it wouldn't actually render outside of the visible width.
Of course, they have flight numbers, though the destination and the departure time was a good heuristic until it was not. I am much better at remembering the departure time than an arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers.
My home airport is a major hub; it is very common for some destinations to have a dozen or more flights across the various airlines. Quite often the American and United flights are scheduled similarly and leave within 30 minutes of each other.
I don't think this is that uncommon, so I've only ever paid attention to airline and flight number. I would recommend everyone else do the same.
>The author gave plenty of other reasons why someone might be stressed out by what's communicated at the airport.
Without objective accounts (ie. a picture), it's unclear whether that's due to poor design or just poor comprehension/situational awareness from the person reading it. For instance, "Now boarding - remain seated" seems like pretty standard priority boarding (eg. first class boards first, economy stays seated). If you're bad at english and all you can do is scan for random keywords, and/or it's your first time flying and you're not aware of this, you might be confused. But there's also so much you can do for this target audience.
If that's the case it means that they can show the "Now boarding - remain seated" only to people that will board in economy seats. I don't think that they can, so it's a bad message that probably came into existence because of some entertaining concatenation of events that somebody in the airport business could be able to explain. But will anybody working in airports read that post?
>If that's the case it means that they can show the "Now boarding - remain seated" only to people that will board in economy seats.
That's physically not possible if all you have is a single display in front of the gate, which is common at most airports. Of course, you can add "First class - now boarding, everyone else - stay seated" but for OP's case where there's reading comprehension issues I doubt that would help.
>I don't think that they can, so it's a bad message that probably came into existence because of some entertaining concatenation of events that somebody in the airport business could be able to explain.
It's not hard to think why it's necessary. Otherwise you have a hoarde of economy people clogging up the gates when it's only supposed to be first class people.
> But there's also so much you can do for this target audience.
The point is not asking one to do something for the target audience beyond showing a bit of compassion. If the passenger is lost/confused and is being yelled at it would do nothing to either diffuse the situation or help the passenger. Hand-holding one or two passengers would only make the experience pleasant enough for them. It has the effect of them learning something they did not know and also wanting to come back again.
> Blaming the airport staff who have to optimize for the greater good is quite something.
I don't think it's actually as noble as "optimizing for the greater good", but rather "optimizing for getting through the day in one piece". Which, in my experience, is why (polite + friendly + reasonable + firm) is the right register to use in pretty much every interaction with airport staff. You're asking them to do something (not telling), but your presence is ideally vaguely net positive (friendly, smiling, relaxed), you're asking for something that's within their authority to do, and there's a vague threat that you're not going to back down if they say no off-hand (their day is going to have a larger hassle-increment if they say no vs. if they say yes).
Written out it kind of reads as cold and calculating, but I think every element of it is the best for everyone involved. You don't end up feeling like you just acquiesced to getting screwed by United or Delta, they get to have a nice friendly interaction that ideally makes those 10 minutes of their day suck less than it could have with an asshole customer.
Greater good my posterior. The grandma was in the wrong place at that time because they optimised the experience to extract the most money out of the flying public. They were boarding the people who paid extra, and since she didn't they couldn't let her board. Because if they do why would anyone pay extra for their "higher class" more expensive tickets. They could have said "passport?" and then pointed her towards the gate. But doing so as a policy would net the corporation less profit. So they don't.
In other words the grandma's distress was by design. You can avoid the indignity of turned away from the gate by coughing up more money. She quite literally "didn't know her place" both in the queue and in the hierarchy.
>They were boarding the people who paid extra, and since she didn't they couldn't let her board. Because if they do why would anyone pay extra for their "higher class" more expensive tickets.
The class conflict/"corporate profit" angle doesn't make any sense because even in communism you'd still need to board people in different groups (eg. people who are disabled and/or need assistance first, then people at the back, all the way to the front), thereby creating the issue described in the OP.
It makes every sense. andsoitis claimed that the process is optimised for "greater good". My observation is that it is not. It is optimised for profit. That's it.
If there were some change they could enact which improves the "greater good" (whatever that is) at the cost of profit, they wouldn't. Simple as that.
> or need assistance first
yeah. Like a grandma with a tenuous command of the language and four kids. :)
> thereby creating the issue described in the OP.
I'm sure a fictional airport organised by other principles would have other problems. Doesn't change a bit that the current airport you can experience is optimised for profit, and not for "greater good".
>If there were some change they could enact which improves the "greater good" (whatever that is) at the cost of profit, they wouldn't. Simple as that.
Right, nobody thinks airports/airlines are altruistic organizations, but this specific complaint doesn't make any sense because the specific decision to board by sections is for the greater good. A moshpit where everybody boards at once benefits no one. In this case, "greater good" and "maximize profit" overlaps.
>yeah. Like a grandma with a tenuous command of the language and four kids. :)
Usually this would be handled by the airport, not the airlines. Moreover airports usually have criteria for which people can get assistance, and they can only help people that they think need assistance. It's easily to identify someone in a wheelchair, less easy to identify "grandma with a tenuous command of the language" without engaging in sterotyping/racial profiling.
The fact that airport staff are forced to be cattle dogs given the lack of airport prior capacity planning is exactly what the author is trying to convey.
It touches on a “race to the bottom” that European low cost carriers have have shown that people don’t care about airport stress in the shadow of cost — which lends to the enshittification of the whole overall experience.
It’s so bad that people are starting to /pay/ to have less stress by visiting airport lounges, which are now starting to be, themselves, overcrowded due to the increase in demand.[1]
So you don't want tourists to your Country? You do realize 95% of the World lives outside the US? and at least 80% lives in non-English speaking Countries? Creating a horrid experience for them would mean losing huge chuck of that wealth flowing into your Country. Especially so when their income levels are rising drastically compared to a US Citizen (in terms of % change in disposable income as many are from low cost of living countries).
We do not need everyones bags to be scanned. We do not need everyones bodies to be scanned. We do not need facial recognition at TSA, to board international flights, and to enter the country. We do not need to ban cash at airports. We do not need to take off our shoes (ig that changed). We do not need to restrict liquids.
Replace "passengers" with "users" and replace "airport workers" with "product team members", and you have a good argument for why good usability and good service design really matter in the world.
I traveled in the flight for the first time 2 months back and I find this article so similar to my experience.
I had so much confusion on the entire protocols on what is allowed and what is not and all those terminologies, such that a week before travel, I had my friend do a full end-to-end guide on everything we must do since entering an airport to coming out of it.
Even then when I visited it, it was a little different than what my friend told me. But thankfully it is not a rushy airport, so I frankly told my situation to the person issuing boarding pass and he told me in detailed manner everything (my biggest confusion was with luggages).
Unlike a bus or train which you can at the worst case run through and board, for airplanes, you need to go through a lot of checkings and phew...
When in flight, there were a few instructions, messages from pilot etc. However they spoke so fast that it was so unclear. The passangers around me were also talking a little loudly, so I couldn't understand anything.
May be from what I understand, these instructions are so regular, so people who frequent flights find it boring.
For me it was both curiosity and feae of missing important details. And since it was India, they said the instructions in both English and Hindi only (I know only a little Hindi), even though the flights were for different language speaking region.
At the end, it somehow ended up fine. But I think if it were my parents in my place, the journey could have been a nightmare :)
Like, I hate the sheer size of Schiphol, but I’m never wondering where anything is, and if I need to get there I can always get there by sprinting. I like that part of it.
I hate airport. From having to arrive many hours early to a place out of the city and often poorly connected by public transport, expensive to park if you dare take your car, extremely expensive if you take a taxi or be left wherever if you take an uber. Then you have to find your way through huge, terminal to find your gate, understand the arbitrary rules of the airlines you were forced to choose, having your stuff messed with by security, having the constant pressure of time, only for the airline to be hours late with no compensation. And so many more.
Nowadays, if I can take a train, I take the train. At least where I live, the train stations are almost always in the city, very well-connected, are more comfortable, you can arrive very late at the train station since there is no gate, no security, no bullshit. And even if the trip is 3-4h longer with a train, you can make up for it by not having to show up minimum 1 hour early at the airport, then having to wait 1 hour for a slow bus that takes you from the airport to the actual city center, or take a taxi and give them all your life savings.
Yeah, airports are way too stressful. I'd honestly rather use a train to travel across a continent than use an airplane. The time saved just isn't worth the stress.
What’s crazy is that this is the list of things that are wrong when everything is going right.
I was at O’hare for the first time in a few decades a few weeks ago and my flight was delayed due to some mechanical issue with the assigned plane. At least that’s what the app said. Because of the delay, the gate kept changing. We were supposed to know this because every once in a while the gate we were at no longer said it was our flight, so there must be some other location. I think at least one of the times it was mentioned over the PA, but besides the flight number everything else was unintelligible.
We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving. It doesn’t matter that our tickets were from earlier in the day. They’ve already screwed over 150 passengers. Screwing them over more is far less bad than delaying them slightly but having to also delay later flights by a little bit, too. I think we watched three flights leave. As a group of six, with four children, the likelihood of standby coming through on any of these is less than zero.
On the departure board the flight was referred to by a carrier other than the one we bought the tickets from, because of course everyone should know every carrier’s partner airlines and how their flight numbers map.
Three hours of delay had arrived but the plane was finally at the gate. FAA says I’m entitled to a meal for the delay, so I go ask how to redeem it. I’m told to go back to customer service near security and stand in a line to get a voucher. But if I miss the flight, there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m sure that’s not how that’s supposed to work, but I’m several hours delayed already, my plans for the day are shot, missing the flight it really an option just so I can get some airport food.
The time has arrived to start boarding. I’m on chat complaining about the service when it disconnects. The app stops working, so I check the airline’s website, and get a hard down, unstyled error message. I tell my wife that something seems wrong with their site and have my suspicion confirmed a few minutes later that their entire system is down and all flights are halted until further notice. No ETA.
At this point Reddit has more information about what’s happening than the gate agent. It’s another 45 minutes before a mumbly PA announcement tells us flights are delayed due to a global system wide outage.
Fortunately, their IT staff seemed to be on it, and the whole thing only lasted an hour. Then they put us on the plane like nothing happened and even got people to cheer for the crap service. Ice water in hell, I suppose.
> We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving.
I feel like there is a lot more to the fungibility of planes. E.g. add just one more consideration, like bag loading, to the scenario and suddenly you end up with a mess of not great answers for a whole complex tree of things unless you somehow know with certainty how long the fix is actually going to take ahead of time. The more of these additional considerations you add, the more they start interacting with each other and the less likely "just switch the planes" only means passing the delay along.
That’s the airline’s concern. Imagine having a reservation at a restaurant and something happens to make the table unavailable. Should you wait for everyone else who made later reservations and all the walk ins who came while waiting you were waiting for your table to finish before getting seated? Your meal was already ruined, no sense in ruining the meals of everyone else?
What about hotel reservations, or literally any other thing you book ahead of time.
If a bus is taken out of service the people who were waiting for that stop at that time don’t go to the back of the line, they get the next bus. I’m sure airlines feel they are more sophisticated than public transit, but as a passenger I see little difference.
If you look at it just from a cost perspective, then you’re absolutely right. And that’s why everything sucks. If you look at it from a human perspective and design around customer service the end result would be different.
There’s been a bunch of airline IT meltdowns in recent years, some much much worse than what you described. Airlines just decided IT is a “cost center” and decided not to maintain it.
I flew out of JFK a few days ago. Delta has about 50 check-in kiosk, and a few gate agents. With so many terminals, I was wondering why the area was so packed, with ten-minute lines to use an check-in kiosk.
I went to see a gate agent because I had a question. Right after yelling at someone else for the same reason, they told me "No, you have to use the kiosks."
By the time I got to the check-in kiosks I figured it out. Maybe they worked for some people but it had to be like 20% at best. Everyone else had to have help, myself included. It wouldn't scan my passport for the first 5 attempts, and then it wouldnt print my bag tag so I had to see the agent anyways.
What is the purpose of an automated system that drives everyone to the manual system? It just added an extra step.
The signage and rules can be confusing, but I don’t recall bad experiences with airport staff. They are just trying to do their job in a hectic place. I don’t believe they are intentionally being difficult, and honestly everyone can have a bad day.
I haven't flown in a few years, it was alright last time. But if my parents ever want to fly somewhere, I'm coming with them if only to tell them what to expect and help them around.
It's still like in the past days in Business class and upwards, not to mention private flying - all friendly, fully serviced, no nitpicking. Air travel has become more like transatlantic liners from the period just before their demise.
Don’t care about who you sit next to? Have a discount!
Suppose you operate an airline, and your costs increase (e.g. fuel, labor, etc). Your options are to divide the increase equally by number of seats, or you increase price differently based on customer’s ability and willingness to pay.
I do not see what is “wrong” about the latter. In fact, the latter would allow maintaining more access to air travel for those who can afford it the least.
I don’t care for airport lounges, why should I pay for them? Same for bigger seats, or checked bags, or alcoholic drinks, etc.
> I don’t care for airport lounges, why should I pay for them? Same for bigger seats, or checked bags, or alcoholic drinks, etc.
But they can, and will, always stretch this further than it should go.
It's like a restaurant that charges you extra for cutlery. Some cultures eat with their hands, and probably plenty of people would take a discount to do so. But it ruins the experience in the long term, and then the industry demands a bailout and we all get to pay more taxes for a shitty experience so they can buy back shares to boost the stock.
Eventually "basic economy" becomes a single iron maiden at the back of the plane used to punish the lowest-paying passenger for not knowing about its existence.
>But they can, and will, always stretch this further than it should go.
That is just an opinion. For example:
>It's like a restaurant that charges you extra for cutlery. Some cultures eat with their hands, and probably plenty of people would take a discount to do so. But it ruins the experience in the long term
My parents and family come from a culture that almost exclusively eats with their hands. It is so important to them that they actually say they do not feel like they have eaten unless they eat with their hands.
>and then the industry demands a bailout and we all get to pay more taxes for a shitty experience so they can buy back shares to boost the stock.
This is a separate topic about politics, not about the "right" or "wrong" nature of a business choosing how to price discriminate.
>Eventually "basic economy" becomes a single iron maiden at the back of the plane used to punish the lowest-paying passenger for not knowing about its existence.
Not according to any flight I have been on. I don't see the point of feeling outrage at something that hasn't happened. In my experience, basic economy is still just as clean and safe of a seat as the others, you get on the plane, sit down, and put headphones on or read a book or go to sleep. If they let me pay a lower price for that, great!
Because the "sticker" price is prominently advertised, so advertising a lower price than nickel-and-diming up leaves a sour taste in people's mouths rather than advertising a higher price then offering a discount, even if the final prices are the same. Of course, everyone shops for flights on comparison websites, so their only metric is that sticker price, and airlines have to engage in this sort of stuff to be competitive.
What’s wrong is providing a floor that’s beneath human dignity.
Imagine if they charged extra for seat belts, or getting help evacuating after a crash. Some people would be willing to take the extra risk in exchange for paying less. You let more people access air travel. People who value safety can pay extra for more of it. There would be rightful outrage.
Something like lounge access is firmly in the realm of reasonable price discrimination. Charge extra, certainly! But something like charging extra to sit with your travel companions is bullshit. That sort of thing should be strongly rejected.
>Imagine if they charged extra for seat belts, or getting help evacuating after a crash.
Why? This isn't happening, and I can't figure out how it is productive to make up a scenario.
>But something like charging extra to sit with your travel companions is bullshit. That sort of thing should be strongly rejected.
Suppose a plane has seats in groups of 3s, and everyone on the plane is in a group of even number of people. Obviously, seating everyone together is impossible. As a seller, why is it "bullshit" to give the people that do not get to sit with their companion a lower price?
Ryanair threatened to make people pay for toilet usage.
Airlines are looking at standing seats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_seat), which would absolutely impact evacuation safety (mainly a concern of bandwidth through the aisle/doors) to save some ticket costs.
> Obviously, seating everyone together is impossible.
We manage it just fine at the movie theater, at sports stadiums, etc.
Sometimes you're one row behind. Sometimes the last person to book is in a weird spot. But largely, if you want to sit with your spouse, you'll be able to.
At a certain point, the bean counters have to be told no.
Movie theaters do charge to reserve seats now (at least by me), and sports stadiums have done that forever, as far as I know.
>Ryanair threatened to make people pay for toilet usage.
Ryanair says a lot of crap as part of their advertising strategy. It is ragebait/clickbait/etc. Eitherway, it's on the government to enforce basic standards.
>At a certain point, the bean counters have to be told no.
The government should ensure minimum standards (and sufficient competition in the market). Everything else, let the customers decide what they want or do not want to pay for.
The only reason my hypothetical doesn’t happen is because it’s literally illegal. Your scenario doesn’t happen because solo travelers exist and you don’t get an entire plane full of pairs.
Other than TSA, air travel seems better to me than the 1990s.
I don’t need meals for domestic flights, and it’s trivial for me to pack a little something. Noise canceling earphones and ipads/laptops/phones make entertaining oneself trivial.
There is even wifi now, and messaging is free so you can be in constant communication with your friends/family, especially to coordinate pickup.
The planes themselves are better (except maybe if you are a big person). But price per hour of flight time for me has stayed below inflation, so I assume the extra seats helps offset that for me.
I can buy flights anywhere, anytime on my electronic devices, have the boarding passes on my watch or phone or paper, and I can get push notifications about all flights so pickups/dropoffs are simple. I can even see the status of the plane’s previous flight so I get even more of a heads up about delays. There is also luggage tracking available now, at least with airtags if not from the airline itself.
"Other than TSA" sounds to me very much like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
In the early 1990s, my girlfriend was scared of flying. I went with her to the gate for emotional support. I also sometimes met people when they arrived at the gate. No longer, at least, not without some planning.
In the early 1990s, full names and id checks were not required. This made for an active resale market which has since disappeared, with the profit going to the airliners. My mother and I share the same first initial, which proved personally useful one time when we booked the ticket as "E. Smith" since we weren't sure which of us was going make the trip. No longer.
In the 1990s, from drop-off to gate in the small city I lived was about 5 minutes, for carry-on. Check-in at the gate by showing the ticket. The only inspection was for guns. I regularly carried a pocket knife back then, even on planes. No longer.
In the early 2000s I traveled international. My carry-on at times included bottles of beer (to share with people in Europe) and wine (returning from South Africa), since I thought that would be safer than in my luggage. I bought them in regular stores. No longer.
Around 2008 I made the mistake once of returning international via SFO to visit friends there. I knew where they lived - I've driven there many times. But I didn't know their zip, only their street address, and there was no way for me to check in the new automated kiosk without that vital piece of useless information. I was able to look it up, but I was flustered and in panic that I would miss the flight.
Back in the 1990s, as US citizen I could just show up in most countries, with only my passport - no visa, no fingerprinting, no automated facial recognition, and no "electronic system for travel authorization" or rather its foreign equivalents.
It even worked the other way. I had friends of mine from South Africa going to Canada for a conference, with a transfer in the US. They didn't know they were supposed to get a US visa even though they didn't leave the airport. But the US at the time did have the TWOV (Transit Without Visa) program, which meant they were able to get to the conference and back home. They even had a comfortable TWOV room at the airport, and an escort for those who needed to step outside for a smoke. The TWOV program was suspended in 2003 and has not been restored.
Air travel in the 1990s felt like freedom. Now it feels like a key part of modern government security and control, with little leeway for humanity.
And the generations who remember how air travel used to be are dying off. In a few decades, there will be nobody left who knows how good it could be if we stopped deliberately making it shitty.
I'm over 40, and I flew many times before 9/11. Nope, flying has gotten much easier. The entire experience, from getting to the airport and parking to getting to your hotel. Yes, TSA is a drag, but I've never had an issue. And since I got PreCheck, it's gotten easier. Altogether, I enjoy flying.
All of this is true, and no matter how much you do it, it's still all true.
I can't even keep track of what I'm supposed to do at my own home airport that I've been to thousands of times. Some people know me on a first name basis there, and still act judgmental when something was (seemingly randomly) changed and I don't know about it.
TSA is by far the worst in the USA though. Their expectation that you do exactly what you should, without telling you what to do, while constantly changing the rules, is infuriating. Often there'll be 2-3 lines and DESPITE HAVING THE SAME SCANNERS, they'll have different unspoken rules that you are literally yelled at over.
My theory is that it's intentional; change the rules for security personnel so they don't end up in a routine, change them for travelers so... they also don't end up in a routine. If travelers with malicious intent are stressed because of the lack of predictability, they'll be extra stressed when they're up to no good.
Of course, this is baby/bathwater territory as only a fraction of a percentage of people are up to no good, and of those only a percentage is a danger to others.
i made this point earlier but in a TSA line do you not just watch the people in front of you and do what they're required to do? That works pretty well for me.
I will do almost anything to avoid flying, at least short haul. I don’t mind flying: I have no fear of it at all in fact. But I absolutely despise the airport experience, and consider it to be so unpleasant as to be worth avoiding whenever it’s at all feasible to travel by other means.
I mean, almost by definition half of the time people are going through an airport, it's not their home airport. Probably more than half because people chain trips (and even more than that if you count people with a layover). It would make sense for the default assumption when interacting with a visitor is that they've never been there before and are unaware of your procedures.
My observation is that on average, the world is too complex and confusing for the vast majority of people to operate in it without significant struggle.
I feel differently, after travelling a bit all the airports are so cookie cutter I was in awe of the human effort required to reach this point of harmony.
It's all so organized and simple and zero need to rush. They even have signs in all major languages, it's nuts!
Source: SF, Miami, New York, Bolivia, Argentina, Texas - all kind of the same all over. Like visiting different Wawa's.
In Montreal airport few months ago, going through the TSA check: shoes off, laptop out in a separate bin etc etc then the giant rotating MRI, I mean xray, then at the end they took my carry on for further inspection, after waiting for around 30min for my turn, it turned out because I have half full bottle of water.. I told him to toss it and just hand me the bag, he refused, and asked me to wait another 15min, then he escorted me before the TSA check point, and told me to pour the water in specific garbage/container, I did, and he left me with bag open at the beginning, so I put everything inside and wanted to pass the TSA, the guys who just saw me being escorted from the inside, refused to let me pass without doing the whole check again, so, shoes off, rotating xray, etc etc, and this time plus extra manual search or whatever it’s called, maybe because I dared to challenge their authority. The whole process took around an hour, for a half full bottle of water I bought from the airport.
This not the only story, there are many stories, like the one time they politely asked me to keep my bag at the front door of the airplane because there’s no enough space (I found inside people with three pieces tho), silly me I thought I will take it when I leave only to find they checked it, and the rest of the trip I was left with nothing but my passport (luckily I had it with me or I will be stranded), only to find some of my stuff got stolen from my bag and a broken laptop.
The first story however is the symbolization of the infamous Canadian bureaucracy in anything government wise, what something could be solved in one step quickly, gets convoluted with so many steps because who ever designed them is either out of touch of reality and needs to touch some grass, or just straight up moron, the same applies for hospitals ER btw, it’s not “short staff” as they claim, it’s just a poor process design.
> Upon seeing this, the experienced visitor to this sceptred isle knows to smartly turn on their heel because B45 is right behind them, but we occasional travellers don't.
Railways aren't much better. German railways are bad enough, but Eastern Europe... good luck even finding a realtime track schedule, and screw you if you don't speak the language. Last time in Rijeka there was construction going on but no indications anywhere, my fellow travellers were lucky I spoke Croatian and recognized that the attendant was shouting in Croatian for the people on what should have been a train...
Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lot of systems do a bad to terrible job of accommodating people who are unfamiliar with them.
It also doesn't help when so many countries (and even cities) have totally different systems for paying, etc. Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others. And, no, having to scour guidebooks (of possibly outdated info), for all the right incantations for a given locale isn't really satisfactory.
>Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others
The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.
Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.
>Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.
My observation is that's improved a lot in some cases. But I remember I was traveling somewhare on UK trains, and between receipts and tickets for trains after a change, I had this sheaf of cards that my friend and I were rifling through to get on a train (with a short connection) and it wasn't at all obvious what we needed to feed into the turnstyle with people getting annoyed behind us.
When article says "..it's actually behind you" that leads me to believe that if you're staring at those signs then you're actually at B45. I'm not sure off the top of my head how you'd put B45 on those signs in a clear way. If B45 is at the intersection of two hallways then it really shouldn't be on either sign but then where should it be?
This is currently the #4 story on the home page, an article about someone complaining about not being able to figure out an airport. This must be why the standard recommendation is to get to the airport 2 hours(!) before your flight.
Can I recommend something concrete every time something like this happens to you?
1. Use ChatGPT (or similar) to make a fun and attractive greetings card image that is a farcical representation of the situation.
2. Use MoonPig.com (or similar) to send it through the real/royal mail to someone important (but not the CEO) at the company that has annoyed you.
This need not cost more than $6. That's almost certainly less than 1% the cost of the long haul flight that this happened on.
Everything you describe is likely a function of the CFO being allowed to treat the savings they can find as if they are a profit centre. It is incumbent upon those of us that can see a better way to demonstrate that the 5p per flight that the CFO optimised annoyed some customers enough to spend real time bringing it to someone's attention.
The first time I did this I effectively received over $2,000 from my airline of choice (though the path to that was convoluted). Most people don't react well to being told they are wrong. Use your intellect and industry to show them a better way in a positive and friendly way.
You will usually get better results and by spreading more positivity in the world will likely feel happier too.
I can't agree more. I was once catching a flight, went to my gate and found no one there and the flight status monitors saying "Cancelled". I couldn't find an agent at any desk, so went back out of security to check-in to figure out what was going on. The agent proceeded to act like I was the biggest idiot in the world for leaving the gate because "we don't control those boards, your flight isn't cancelled, the gate was changed". So I had to run back through security to barely catch my flight.
Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
Ugh, the industry still needs to do so much work to this end. There are good shops out there, fwiw, but the elitism is real. Totally counterproductive for a means of conveyance that is so elegantly classless (in the positive, egalitarian sense).
I design and build things 100x[0] more complex than any bicycle, yet I don't know the jargon and feel like an idiot when I got into my local bike shop to ask simple questions. They are mostly nice and understanding, but the jargon and elitism is still very real that my wife doesn't like going there.
[0]though adjusting the tension spring on the brake levers still puzzles me sometimes... Looser should mean it travels more when you squeeze and release the brake lever, right? Stiffer spring has less displacement for a given force. Not quite. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/canti-direct.html#parallel
There was a focused effort to "professionalize" the hobby by researcher (crank) John Forester. Thousands of cyclist deaths can be attributed to his efforts, which included promoting "serious" cycling over accessible and casual transport, and personally destroying early plans for widely-available bike lanes in California a la in the Netherlands. Though not as infamous, you can think of him as a mini Moses.
Wow, I had read his book but had no idea that he was so influential pushing efforts to remove separated bike lanes in California.
The children and elderly should simply learn how to bike 45mph in the road.
I bought my wife's bike, which she'd purchased back in England while on a fitness kick, to a local shop in Manhattan for a brake service years ago. I have never forgotten the interaction: the hipster douche who greeted me launched into a multi-minute tirade about how Decathlon was "ruining cycling in Europe" and how I was complicit in doing the same in the USA by bringing this abomination into his store.
I'm pretty sure I know who is more responsible for ruining cycling.
Fortunately my local shop in the suburbs here couldn't be more different. They're patient and lovely with my kids, efficient and non-condescending with my wife, will even send a little car to your house to collect a broken bike for service - whether or not they sold it.
Speaking about elitism/classless - in some german towns, there are more and more non profit self help bike repair places. Good concept I think, but sadly not for E-Bikes it seems. At least I was told that much, so I had to start getting my own repair gear.
Most of them live and breathe biking. They choose to make close to minimum wage to "do what they love", they don't own the store. I think it's genuine excitement and enthusiasm that you take as elitism. Often, it's a big part of their identity... "how could anyone else _not_ care as much"?
I used to bike with a few bike shop employees and they were only in it to eke out a living doing something adjacent to the thing they love, selling bikes was not their passion, riding them and talking about the tech was.
At least 10 years ago, wages in the whole sector were pretty low, so you'd only work there if you really wanted to and valued perks like buying bikes at wholesale (hey, that's half off) and having access to tools or a mechanic buddy.
I'm very familiar with the type of people you're talking about and they're not the elitists I'm talking about. There's a separate segment that, while they may also live and breathe biking, use their specialist knowledge to gate-keep and make people not on their level (customers) feel "less than". It's very shortsighted, because independent bike shops can't afford to be turning off customers- these kind of experiences push people to corporate shops (e.g. Trek), which at least have formalized oversight/training in how to treat customers.
Catering exclusively to snobbery is everywhere in commissioned sales.
The only bike shops that aren't this way are going to be relatively small and new establishments where the owner is the only guy there. Do not expect the advice or inventory to be all that great.
If you just want the advice, catch the salesman that he's eventually forced to hire when they're off work at the bar.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shop
This is my personal favorite story about bike shops (from circa 2008).
At the time, I both lived and worked in Manhattan. I was lucky that biking was an option for commuting but the only bike I had was a 20 year old Giant Acapulco (not a fancy bike at all).
I worked down in Tribeca and one day on the way to work my shifters just broke. Thankfully, there was a bike shop near work so I dropped of the bike in the morning and said I would be back that afternoon.
Fast forward to the afternoon and I come in to pick up my bike (as I assumed it was an easy fix and they would just charge me). The repair counter guy looks at my ticket, checks something and says he has to go get the manager. This is somewhat confusing as this was a simple fix or repair.
The manager comes out and several of the staff are arrayed behind him. Now I'm a mixture of concerned and fascinated as to what could possibly have happened to my bike given this deployment of bike shop personnel.
Manager: "Sir, the repair for your shifters is going to cost $40"
Me: "Ok, is there an issue with that?"
Manager: "Well, a quality used bike would cost you about $60 so we weren't sure how you would want us to proceed"
(I should add that the staff behind him all seemed as though they were holding their breath here).
Me: "That's cool. I'm good with the repair"
Everyone visibly relaxed, the manager turned around, pointed at one guy, then turned back to me and said "Your bike will be ready tomorrow."
My only thought on this level of nervousness is due to the shop being near a lot of investment bank offices that had a very type A guys who were also into bike racing. I myself dealt with a lot of those folks so it's not hard to imagine the shop staff assuming I would be that way too.
I had in internship in San Francisco and had a ~$100 bike. My bike seat and post were stolen one day. I didn't know anything about the "levels" of bikes shops, so I just went to the nearest one. Turned out to be extremely high end, probably not a single bike under $5k. The guy I talked to was so helpful, rummaged around there storage room for 20 minutes, and found me a used seat & post they had down there and just charged me $10.
I had an older/seemingly quite skilled bike mechanic look at my bike, who was happy to deal with my vague gestures about squeaky doohickeys and answer any questions. They knew enough to know what normal people don’t know, though, and how to get from there to what matters.
I think the sort of lingo-centric scoffing “expertise” is a defensive posture that near-novices tend to take, to scare off further questions. You see it in every field, and we should all be careful not to replicate it in our own.
sadly, the best way to get data on flights it to use the airlines app - not anything you'd find at the airport
also, it's easiest to use that same app for the boarding pass too these days
once I printed them out (with the provided pdf) thinking it would be easier, the printed paper didn't work and they said I HAD to install and use the app or go back to a kiosk and use one of their printouts and lose my place in line...)
The guy working at the TSA isn't there because they have a strong grasp on the theory of mind.
Oh the last minute gate change is always ridiculous. I never find it happens at really busy airports either. It's always at the airports that have around 40 gates but only around 6 flights an hour.
I dislike the sense of judgment from TSA officials when I don’t correctly predict which items they do/don’t want me to put in the tray. It’s not my fault that different airports seem to have completely different rules for the same items.
I've often thought that having a standardized checklist on a big board in the security line would be a big help.
Because yeah, it's really annoying getting treated like I'm the dummy by some agent that's only ever known this airport's rules... because this airport has rules entirely different than every other one I've flown through in this decade.Recently had to fly with some splints and crutches and stuff and that was a whole extra set of fun difference in airport rules. First one really wanted to rub their explosives swab on my finger that was held together by exposed metal pins and had exposed subcutaneous tissue. They were a bit put off when I asked for alternate options.
My first act as a TSA agent would be to beg, borrow, or steal a whiteboard for this purpose. They seem very content to explain it to every passenger almost individually though. Which of course slows everything down as someone has to ask every minute whether an iPad is a big or small device. I wonder if there's some weird bureaucracy rule that prevents them from writing their own signs.
Doesn’t work. I was in a queue at SXF airport once. Everybody in the queue passed at least 5 whiteboard-sized posters explaining in detail that you need a 1 litre bag and what’s supposed to go in there. Also, what things you need to present at the check. Those same posters lined the walls of the hall. Yet basically every second person acted completely surprised when the security officer asked for their 1 litre bag. It’s as if those people forgot their brain at home and were all on autopilot.
Might be in part because multiple times I've seen signs/poster etc only good the agent to contradict it once you get there, adding or removing requirements. So you stop trusting it.
A whiteboard I might trust because it was likely handwritten that morning
Does in/out mean in the tray or out of the bag?
Usually airports use signs with both graphics and text for this. Removes the ambiguity unless you mistake the image of a bag for the tray and vice versa.
Which leaves me confused with GP's suggestion. Every TSA line I've been in already has these signs. Are airports in other countries worse about their signage than TSA?
There was zero signage at the last few American airports I flew through. Four airports in 2 weeks and they all had different rules, and felt the need to yell at you for not knowing their nuances.
To me, it's not even about having different rules (which itself is stupid). It's the constant annoyed yelling. Like, can you at least pretend you don't hate yourself, the general public, and your job, for the duration of your shift?
If I worked retail and treated customers like the TSA treats passengers, I'd be fired the first day.
There isn't a standard design for the signs, so each country designs their own. (If they exist.)
Easy fix:
- Laptop: In Tray / In bag
- Shoes: Wear / Remove
I’m sure we can come up with clear wording for such a sign lol.
- Belt/Watch: leave in unless it has enough metal to trip the metal detector, then take off but we’ll yell at you for holding up the line/losing your pants.
Also: here’s a list of things we are constitutionally not allowed to require, but if you choose to opt out you have a random 1:1 chance of being selected for an invasive “enhanced” screening.
Also: here’s where you can pay your bribe^H^H^H^H*Hfee to be prescreened so the whole process is easier for you unless we decide we you should be on the list that we randomly select for “enhanced” screening. Then your children get to watch a large man put his hands all over your body in ways that they’ve been told to never let a stranger touch you. And if you speak up, we’ll do it you your minor children too.
In polyglot Europe, all this stuff should be in pictograms... but isn't.
Reading here the x-ray machine model or type might be a true technical reason why there are seemingly always different rules. Even same airport, different terminal canbe different due to different build year and machines. What I don't understand is why people simply don't pay attention? By the time it's my turn I have seen the 3-10 people in front of me go through the motions, so I naturally preempt and prepare based on what I have observed. Not a guarantee for no issues but a solid step to not mess up completely.
In/out of the bag, all items have to be in a tray (at least, in every airport I've flown in
Yes, mam.
One time, a TSA official told me "never take off your watch in an airport unless you want to lose it" -- which is how I learned that you can wear your watch through the metal detector just fine, which I've now done dozens of times.
Until a few weeks ago when a another TSA official berated me for thinking I could walk through a metal detector wearing a watch...
Proximity is the issue. If the watch or bracelet wrist is very physically close to the detector, it will set it off.
You're supposed to the watch/bracelet, but you do have to hold your wrist close to your body. You kind of want to hold your hands in front of your body as if you're about to grab one of your wrists with your other hand.
Watches and other jewelry are basically right at the cutoff of detection. They want to detect small knives but not earrings.
This is all absolutely tribal airport knowledge. I had been traveling for work for years, taken hundreds of flights, but I only found this out when my partner tried to go through a metal detector with a semi-permanent bracelet that requires a small screwdriver to take off, and the TSA person mercifully told her exactly how to pose as she walked through the detector.
I just put my watch, wallet, phone and other loose or pocket belongings in my backpack or jacket that's already going in the tray. No chance of losing anything.
My wife and I just habitually empty our hands and pockets into the bin.
Most recent flight we took, she couldn't find her passport for the extra security check right before the gate. It took us about half an hour to get around to having the security open up the (now closed) bag scanner, which lo and behold, had somehow eaten her (securely places in the bin) passport. The tech was shaking his head, saying "See, this is why you don't put your passport loose in the bin" as if that's a normal thing everyone already knows specifically to avoid.
I was told this about my passport and wallet once. Then the other day asked if I could keep a tissue in my pocket and was told to put it in the tray. I think it depends on the scanners (if you’re going through a metal sector it’s fine, if its one of the more fancy scanners they need everything off your person.
Even different lines in the same security area can have different rules. If you travel a lot you start to recognize which machines require laptops out of bags and which don't, for instance.
It is really anxiety inducing overall though. Not to mention the ritual of getting partly undressed before the stupid thing then trying to put everything back on and in pockets on the other side.
Does anyone happen to know which ones are fine with 2 laptops per bag and which ones aren't?
I had a small local airport act like I was an idiot for not knowing they wanted all food items removed from carryon for scanning.
Literally never heard of that.
TSA PreCheck means I don't have to worry about those rules. Completely worth it. I haven't taken off my shoes, belt, taken out my laptop or liquids in a decade.
Until you get transferred and the TSA check magically vanishes before you can update it in their app.
Except sometimes the TSA precheck and regular lines are the same and they give you this little placard that sometimes a guy behind the conveyor belt will agree means you don't need to take off your shoes and belt...
I've experienced this at non-US airports where the x-ray at the entrance asks for different things to be in the tray than the x-rays before boarding. It's impossible to keep track of what goes where.
Even at the same airport they can’t seem to get it right amongst themselves. Recently had one TSA person yelling at me to keep something in my bag and then the next person down the line yelling at me for having it in my bag.
When I pointed to the other agent and said “your friend over there told me to do the opposite, that’s why it’s in there!” they just sort of scowled at me.
I just smiled and went about my day, but yes the TSA is often just a total dumpster fire. Some folks are very nice but too many of their folks have a giant chip on their shoulder about something.
> When I pointed to the other agent and said “your friend over there told me to do the opposite, that’s why it’s in there!” they just sort of scowled at me.
Recent fun experience in Amsterdam:
security line was moving veeeery slowly. Almost every bag got flagged for inspection. As I’m waiting for my bag to get checked, I see two agents briefly mutter in each others ears. One of them walks up to the lady manning the xray machine, taps her on the shoulder, says something in her ear and they swap places. He goes on xray machine, she start checking bags.
Almost every bag after that passed the xray test. Line started moving quickly
My personal positive experience in English speaking country (but not US or UK obviously) was the staff said that passengers don't need to take out stuff from hand luggage for security scanning because they have "the new kind of machines" although the machines didn't look exactly new.
The “new” machines are more like a CAT scanner vs just a 2D x-ray so they allow for easier examination of bag contents and more insight on the composition of materials.
Perhaps it's newer software, better at flagging and identifying things?
Seriously though they likely profiled the shit out of everyone and the system said that there are no terrorists or drug dealers in the bunch.
Does security actually care about drugs? As long as they are explosive it is not their job. They are the job of customs agents...
I used to travel for work. 100ish flight segments a year all over the country, typically carrying two laptops - corporate and client.
In one airport, I had a TSA agent yell at me that I'm not allowed to bring two laptops through precheck in my bag. That they had to go through separately. I complied but asked if that was this airport's policy because no other airport seemed to care. She swore up and down that this was national TSA policy and I should know better if I flew so much.
When I look at the TSA's success rates in audits, I tend to agree with the claim that it is more a government jobs program than a security agency.
And, to be clear, it's a crappy job. Get up ungodly early to travel to a work site in the middle of nowhere to shepherd thousands of jumpy/tired strangers* through arcane procedure (possibly in a language that they don't exactly have a firm grasp of) in the hopes of catching the one-in-a-million who has shown up specifically with the intent to kill you and as many other people as possible (or so your training says).
All while gaining basically no transferrable skills.
*Also, a significant portion of these strangers are headed to destinations and experiences you could never dream of affording or having the opportunity to access.
So many airports don't have a sign telling you what to take out for some reason.
There’s a fundamental issue with people, which is that it’s difficult to treat masses of people as separate individuals.
After the 20th time you ask someone to take out their laptop, there’s a part of you that’s screaming, “we’ve done this 20 times, you should know this by now!” Of course, “we” haven’t done this 20 times, only one side of the interaction has the repeated experience. But it’s natural to project that onto the other person, and get into a mode of, “I’ve told you before.”
Obviously this can be overcome, I'm not sure TSA hires people with enough self awareness to even see the problem.
Isn’t this the point? To destabilize you, put you on your back foot, make you feel preemptively guilty and a little angry, to feel the presence of an Authority?
The point is to be seen to be doing something, so that the nervous public sees that Something is being Done, and so that politicians can say they did all they could the next time there’s an attack. Anything they actually do is very much secondary.
And annoyingly, the real, meaningful things they do do aren't sexy.
Reinforced cockpit doors are basically invisible, but they've also basically made hijackings impossible, especially when coupled with the fact that passengers will no longer assume the plane will safely land and negotiate.
This is one of my major pet peeves, and it extends well beyond TSA. Help desks, call centers, car rentals... Essentially, it's when someone expects you to be able to do their job. When you invariably don't, they treat you as if you're stupid.
This has some lessons that apply much more broadly than to just airports (e.g. apps that make you jump through hoops and expect you to know what 2fa or SSO mean)
Exactly. That led me to wonder what in my job do I wrongly assume for my users.
Am I crazy or are the general workers at most US airports of dubious quality at best?
Airport jobs are some of the worst possible jobs - poor pay, bad hours, very long effective commutes (when you consider that they don't clock in until after get to the terminal, get through security), and angry customers screaming at you for something that's not your fault.
Lazy/incompetent/annoyed employees is the inevitable outcome of such an environment
Angry customers yelling at them also helps explains why they yell at customers (hurt people hurt people etc)
You get what you pay for. And they're being paid barely above minimum wage.
about a half of a developed country's minimum wage.
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s minimum wage for the location. Doesn’t matter if they earn more than a highly skilled professional in a different country, it doesn’t change the skill set.
FWIW though, I rarely had bad experiences with airport staff. They are just trying to do their jobs in a hectic place and don’t intentionally make our lives difficult.
That it's a near minimum wage job is not actually the fact though. Even the minimum starting salary for an entry level TSA position is higher than the highest minimum wage of any city/county/state in the US. The median TSA salary is also a hair above the median of full time salary in the US.
For the most part I agree most are at least neutral though. I.e. they are there because it's a job, not because they hate people or love people and this job was the way to do that. It's just the ones that do tend to really stand out for people.
TSA are not general workers, they're not the subject of this thread. We mean baggage loaders, ticket booth operators, the people managing the boarding, etc. They're making about as much as they could've made in Amazon warehouse. So their attitude is about the same as at Amazon warehouse. And for their employers, that's okay because it's not like they're going to lose any business due to bad customer service. Commercial flying is the worst it's ever been, and yet there are more passengers than ever before.
Probably the lowest paid job where you have to wear a full uniform and people’s lives depend on you (at least, that’s the expectation)
In addition to the minimum wage they get paid, it's also the minimum (negative) value they add. There's zero reason to do better at a job that already is a waste of almost everyone's time.
They do add some value, but not those inside the terminal, except the nice people behind the check in counter and the curb luggage assistants (captains?) that will take your luggage, give you the boarding pass, and off you go? Golden. It seems they do well on tips. It's worth every $10-20 bucks or whatever it is now.
It is when you get to the security is where you meet the UpsideDown. Condescending, most all of them, ime.
The TSA and some immigration ones are even malicious
I have gone through Schiphol and strip searched because the buttons on my winter coat were suspicious.
> general workers at most airports
Yes, exactly. But actually, given what they must be paid they do an admirable job. I can’t truly blame someone for not giving a shit, it’s just frustrating for me when getting on my flight depends on them doing so.
Everyone you interact with from the moment you enter the airport has that Brooklyn-diner-employee “whaddayawaaaant?” attitude. Like your very presence as a customer annoys them. Everyone is in dire need of customer service training. The DMV is more pleasant.
Look, our culture does not reward excellence, so those people are doing the least possible to not get fired. That's kind of the whole American thing in general at this point. Nobody is doing great outside of technology workers, and even then, only some of them. You're not going to have a great experience in general from people here. There are always outliers, but those are individuals who have found some internal motivation to go above and beyond, and it's not a systemic thing.
This is not a US-only airport staff issue. I am on the road most of the last three decades and it is international. It is one, binding "quality" in every country. Most the airport staff's core competency rests elsewhere in almost all airports.
I am hedging because i have had nuggets of exceptional service and support here and there, even in nightmarish hellscapes like Heathrow. Flight attendants are a whole different area of joy and fears...
You're not crazy at all. They seem to be selected for having a low IQ and no common sense.
Ironic.
Last time I flew, it was with United and I highly recommend their app. Clearly designed by people who know airports suck. It automated everything, from checkin and tickets, kept me updated on flights and gates, mapped them out and told me how long it would take to get to the gate and where security lines were the longest. Even tracked my checked luggage.
Not a big fan of having to load up an app to do something that should be (an in some cases, used to be) effortless. At some airlines, the gate agents are now starting to expect you to use the app for things, and they'll give an annoyed snort if you ask them for information. Sorry, Tiffany, but your airline app doesn't work on my phone because United's lazy software engineers cut off support for Operating Systems older than the previous version.
> Even tracked by checked luggage.
Which would be great if it was actually accurate. Took a United flight two days ago. Checked two bags. App only reported one bag loaded onto plane. Spent the flight anxiously wondering if the other bag had been lost. Both bags arrived fine.
I'd rather have no information than unreliable information.
Put an airtag into literally every bag you check. Helps you figure out not just whether they made it on the flight, but also if they ended up at some baggage claim on the other end of the airport instead of the one they were supposed to be at
Do not let peace be given away as you cannot control what you cannot control.
i think that 90% of these problems would be solved by an easily accessible, standardized map of each airport.
When i attempted to find airport maps, I was met with a mess of mobile apps, mobile website pdf's, and an enormous amount of text.
Just... give me an easy to use map. Call out the obvious use cases like "how to transfer terminals" and "your bags will/will-not be checked through".
maybe this doesn't work in every airport but you can hold up your phone with the camera on, point it down the hallway, and get step by step directions to get to your gate.
What, your stock camera app gives you step by step directions?!
Feels like your explanation is missing a few steps.
I suspect airports could be a whole lot simpler if the notions of "security" and "border control" didn't exist or were otherwise relaxed.
My favorite but of airport-ese that emerged post-9/11 is that on most US airlines you can now have 1 carry-on and 1 personal item.
As far as I can tell the difference between them is that a personal item can't have wheels.
Usually the rule is that the personal item must fit under the seat in front of you, the carry-on may be a bit larger.
I have boarded with a wheeled carry-on + wheeled personal item (a backpack with wheels) in the past, but every time the gate agent tested the personal item for size.
I'm sure that's technically true -- but as long as your personal item doesn't have wheels they seem completely unconcerned with the size. I frequently travel with a duffel bag carry-on that goes in the overhead. On most flights they let me waltz onto the plane with it and a backpack long after they start forcing everyone to gate check their rollerboards.
They could also just say "only one carry-on can go in the overhead bin."
The specific rule is that a personal item must be able to fit under the seat in front of you, in that space, without any sort of extension into the aisle.
At most gates, I've seen the little boxes that are used to size test carry on luggage to also have a section to size test personal items.
My experience is that it barely fits a large backpack with some books, snacks, and at least one 15 inch laptop.
Carry on luggage can be much, much larger.
> I frequently travel with a duffel bag carry-on that goes in the overhead
Yes, that is one carry on luggage item, and one personal item.
>They could also just say "only one carry-on can go in the overhead bin."
No because you are not afforded two carry on luggage items. One item has to be small enough to fit under the seat in front of you.
A couple of weeks back I was flying out of Chicago O'Hare. The guy in front of me had a carryon suitcase, a laptop bag, and a fanny pack attached to the carryon. The employee checking us in told him that the fanny pack was considered a second personal item. He had to remove it from the bag and wear it on him. Then it became part of his attire and that was A-OK.
My last four flights have each made me gate-check my carry-on at the jetway.
They could've saved a lot of time and labor by just letting me check it like I would have before they started charging $30-50 each way for it.
That is the most counter-intuitive thing for me while flying. Why make me pay to check my bag? Make people pay to carry on a bag. Most of the time boarding and leaving a plane is taken up with people dealing with overhead bags. Checking a bag should be the cheapest option to incentivize people to be more efficient.
If checking the bag is free, everyone would do it, leaving the overhead space empty. That overhead space is flying to the destination anyway, so it’s better to make sure it’s full. The. If there’s free space in the hold underneath, they can transport other things like cargo (which makes them money).
My best guess is that at least some airports will charge the airlines per checked in bag. Thus to save money if possible people carrying them inside is most profitable.
Most flights on busy, small planes, where most passengers are wheeling chunky rollboards up, will offer complementary gate check for larger carry on bags. Often you can actually check such a bag for free at the bag check counter before security - even if your ticket does not include any checked baggage.
Yes, I know, that's what I described. So why not a fee for carry-on - the actual limited resource on such a plane - and a free small checked bag to be efficiently and cheaply shepherded from the entrance all the way to the destination by staff and machines specialized to that?
This also allows me to actually plan for what I need on the plane versus what I don't, instead of an at-gate shuffle of medications and charger blocks from one bag to another.
My point is that that is the service you are getting from regional/express airlines these days. Some of them offer ‘personal item only’ basic tickets which means ‘carry ons’ are extra; and de facto ’carry ons’ are actually checked bags, because everyone knows they are going to offer complementary gate check – and it turns out you can in fact often just check the bag for free at check in. And of course this allows you to pack things in that bag that can go in the hold, but that you wouldn’t be allowed to take through security, like standard size toiletry bottles.
What’s weird is, I agree, the way it’s described and marketed. Carry on add-ons should be sold as ‘small checked bag’. As it is, if you know your carry on is going to be gate checked it’s easy to plan where you pack your lithium battery devices; if you don’t you’ll be doing the gate check shuffle.
> My point is that that is the service you are getting from regional/express airlines these days.
But it's unnecessarily implemented in a costly, inefficient, annoying way that makes the entire experience worse to no one's benefit.
See original post, I guess?
A lot of the constraints in how airlines can market service levels are imposed by the ticketing aggregation standards and how fares show up in searches. There are also issues with creating differences in luggage standards between regional and long haul flights because of through ticketing.
It’s probably more complicated than it looks from the outside, and all falls into the same problem of overall air travel inscrutability caused by the ‘it makes sense to the people who are in it but looks Byzantine from outside’ problems the original article here is complaining about.
I tend to doubt it's more complicated than it looks.
It's a way to make more money off people for worse service, with the externalities going on people who can't do anything about it.
To me it implies that the $50 price for a checked bag is just free money to them, and that enough people end up using it anyway.
For people who travel for work, how often do you get a checked bag in your fare?
One of the best investments I ever made was the original Patagonia MLC wheelie. It stands for Maximum Legal Carry-on. They have a black hole version now which I am not familiar with but I assume is the same quality / usefulness. I had a few jobs where I commuted regularly on CRJ 200's and this bag fits in the overhead with no issue. The ability to pop out the straps and wear it like a backpack makes the gate agents much less concerned about the size.
The personal item has to fit under the seat in front of you
One time in 2013 I was flying from San Francisco to Phoenix with a layover in LA. I purchased my ticket directly from United, the flights had a UAXXXX flight number, and the printed tickets I got when I checked in had United branding on them.
I got to LAX and I proceeded to try to find my UA flight, but the flight number was nowhere to be found. I waited a bit and when it still didn’t show up on the monitor, I asked a gate agent. The agent looked at my ticket and told me to keep waiting.
Eventually I started to get worried as my departure time was approaching. I asked another gate agent, and this time I was informed my flight was not a United flight at all! It was a US Airways flight. Also, it was in a completely different terminal. Also, at LAX to move between terminals you have to exit security and hike across parking structures and parking lots. There was no way I would make my flight.
I looked at my ticket and sure enough, in small print it said “operated by US airways.” I hadn’t even noticed this, but even if I had, how was I supposed to know that this meant it was literally not a United flight at all?
Thankfully a friendly customer service agent took mercy on me and got me booked on an American flight later that day.
I later learned from a flight attendant friend that this was called a “code share” and it was subsequently changed to make it more user friendly.
There are a million things like this I don’t even think about anymore because I travel so much. But when I think back to those days of early adulthood I remember how stressful and confusing airports could be.
In Lexington, KY I was chided for taking out my laptop "You don't need to do that" and then at Dallas Fort Worth I got chided for not taking out my laptop. Kafkaesque is the best word I have to describe it. Turns out Lexington has nicer/newer scanners and somehow I'm supposed to know which scanners you need to take your laptop out for.
Additionally I want to make a scene every time I hand over documents and get told "I don't need this" since if I hadn't provided that ID/Passport/Boarding pass there was an equal chance I'd get berated for not providing it. There is zero empathy for the traveller. If I walk forward I get yelled at, if I wait to be called I get yelled at, it's infuriating. Everything about the airport feels like a lose-lose scenario to me.
I don't fly that often and every time I do I hate the airport experience so much because I feel like I'm constantly doing _something_ wrong.
The security theater of the TSA is just the moldy cherry on top of the shit sundae that is flying.
I'm pretty sure this is a purposeful "feature" of security at least for North America. They don't want anyone getting comfortable with the process and constantly make changes to ensure this. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish other than to make air travel less comfortable.
I recently flew and the airport had gotten the new scanners since the last time I had gone somewhere. The signage was confusing as only some of the lines had signs that specifically said you didn't have to take out your electronics on "this lane only". Even with the new scanners they were pulling out half the bags for additional screening and only had one person doing the additional screening.
Coming back from overseas I saw how it was supposed to work, walked up and they directed me to a line and a specific bin loading station, had someone remind me to ensure my pockets were empty, walked through the scanner and my bag was already waiting for me, took all of 2 minutes.
what i do in tsa lines is just watch the people in front of me and the directions given to them. It's kind of hard to ignore actually.
Lexington KY is a small airport, I walked right up to an empty line with no one in front of me and there were only 2-3 people in front of my at DFW and no one had a laptop I guess?
The entire airport experience is me trying to watch the people in front of me and try to decipher what I need to do to comply best. I still feel like a fish out of water every time.
Everything you’re saying is how I feel as a native English speaker and it drives me absolutely nuts. People in airports are obsessed with telling you what you can’t do.
The one thing that kind of works for me is, “Well, what should I do?” when they bark orders about what I can’t do.
“You can’t have your boarding pass in your hand!”, when you’re in the x-ray. “Where should I put it now?”
Oh well, it turns out I actually can have it in my hand. Thanks.
Experienced travelers also often face troubled, contradictory instructions from airport staff seemingly at random.
The experience doesn't have to be so stressful and confusing, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
Yes, this is a thing too. It's confusing for people who don't fly often for the obvious reasons, but experienced travelers have it just as bad because the rules vary wildly by airport and country.
I can't remember which airports/countries/systems require which procedures, so I just have to go in blind every time.
Navigation in a lot of public places is pretty bad. I think interactive maps on small terminals could help a lot. Personally, I find it much easier to understand things from a map, especially when it shows exactly where you are.
This shouldn't really be directed at people who work at the airport. Almost everything mentioned is the fault of the people who designed the airport and the people who run the airport.
The latter group are so, so happy that you addressed the former, and not them. They have successfully avoided the inconvenience and scrutiny that would prompt them to change. (Of course, between Abe and the UHC guy, taking your complaints directly to an executive also seems to be effective, if not even more so.)
Agree 100. Most of my frustration with things in the world goes right to this IE it's the folks who design/administer it that I blame. Sure, the users and/or operators of any given system can find a way to use/operate things incorrectly. But, so many things are just clearly lazy in design. And, n=1 here, in many cases having worked in service/retail/operations roles, it's usually a matter of decision makers not listening to folks that have to work around the sillyness day to day that is to blame. So long as the front line folks work around it, the decision makers consider it solved...
If someone works at the airport and is screaming at people with limited English proficiency who rarely fly, that is the fault of the rude employee. They should get a different job.
It’s a customer facing role where the main responsibility is directing confused and anxious people.
How about two different planes departing to exactly the same destination at exactly the same time from two different terminals? That's how I missed my plane from Belgrade to Vienna. I have no other explanation but that they do it on purpose.
> I have no other explanation but that they do it on purpose.
It's much simpler; the incoming plane takes pretty much any available gate, because they are all almost always full.
Getting the two flights to Vienna in the same spot might mean an hour of extra waiting on the tarmac for a gate to open up.
Also, two neighboring gates saying "Now boarding for Vienna" will confuse people too. You're a bit screwed either way.
The airport departure board doesn't have flight numbers? All the ones I've seen do. And if you can't notice the difference between two different flight numbers, how are you going to notice the difference between one flight departing at 1:35 and another that departs at 1:45?
During the ongoing redevelopment of Belgrade airport I did find myself with a short connection there and unable to find a departure board. I checked the airport website, but it only had the flight names and not gates!
Beginning to get worried and with no-one to talk to in the construction site of an airport I discovered that I needed to rotate my phone and then the extra columns appeared on their website. Yes I had tried scrolling and zooming, but in portrait it wouldn't actually render outside of the visible width.
Of course, they have flight numbers, though the destination and the departure time was a good heuristic until it was not. I am much better at remembering the departure time than an arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers.
My home airport is a major hub; it is very common for some destinations to have a dozen or more flights across the various airlines. Quite often the American and United flights are scheduled similarly and leave within 30 minutes of each other.
I don't think this is that uncommon, so I've only ever paid attention to airline and flight number. I would recommend everyone else do the same.
Flight arrival and departure times can change suddenly without ample notice. That was never a good way to locate your flight.
The flight number is on the ticket/boarding pass.
> She was anxious, because you instilled a sense of panic in her.
That's not why she was anxious! She was anxious because, according to author's own account, this is someone:
a) flying for the first time
b) hardly speaks English
c) is in a foreign country
d) solo responsible for 4 grand kids running around
etc.
Blaming the airport staff who have to optimize for the greater good is quite something.
Now boarding - remain seated. Gate closing!
The author gave plenty of other reasons why someone might be stressed out by what's communicated at the airport.
The whole point is that airport staff (and especially leadership) are maybe not so great at "optimizing for the greater good" always.
>Now boarding - remain seated. Gate closing!
>The author gave plenty of other reasons why someone might be stressed out by what's communicated at the airport.
Without objective accounts (ie. a picture), it's unclear whether that's due to poor design or just poor comprehension/situational awareness from the person reading it. For instance, "Now boarding - remain seated" seems like pretty standard priority boarding (eg. first class boards first, economy stays seated). If you're bad at english and all you can do is scan for random keywords, and/or it's your first time flying and you're not aware of this, you might be confused. But there's also so much you can do for this target audience.
If that's the case it means that they can show the "Now boarding - remain seated" only to people that will board in economy seats. I don't think that they can, so it's a bad message that probably came into existence because of some entertaining concatenation of events that somebody in the airport business could be able to explain. But will anybody working in airports read that post?
>If that's the case it means that they can show the "Now boarding - remain seated" only to people that will board in economy seats.
That's physically not possible if all you have is a single display in front of the gate, which is common at most airports. Of course, you can add "First class - now boarding, everyone else - stay seated" but for OP's case where there's reading comprehension issues I doubt that would help.
>I don't think that they can, so it's a bad message that probably came into existence because of some entertaining concatenation of events that somebody in the airport business could be able to explain.
It's not hard to think why it's necessary. Otherwise you have a hoarde of economy people clogging up the gates when it's only supposed to be first class people.
> But there's also so much you can do for this target audience.
The point is not asking one to do something for the target audience beyond showing a bit of compassion. If the passenger is lost/confused and is being yelled at it would do nothing to either diffuse the situation or help the passenger. Hand-holding one or two passengers would only make the experience pleasant enough for them. It has the effect of them learning something they did not know and also wanting to come back again.
> Blaming the airport staff who have to optimize for the greater good is quite something.
I don't think it's actually as noble as "optimizing for the greater good", but rather "optimizing for getting through the day in one piece". Which, in my experience, is why (polite + friendly + reasonable + firm) is the right register to use in pretty much every interaction with airport staff. You're asking them to do something (not telling), but your presence is ideally vaguely net positive (friendly, smiling, relaxed), you're asking for something that's within their authority to do, and there's a vague threat that you're not going to back down if they say no off-hand (their day is going to have a larger hassle-increment if they say no vs. if they say yes).
Written out it kind of reads as cold and calculating, but I think every element of it is the best for everyone involved. You don't end up feeling like you just acquiesced to getting screwed by United or Delta, they get to have a nice friendly interaction that ideally makes those 10 minutes of their day suck less than it could have with an asshole customer.
It is the delicate art of being a persistent problem that is more pleasant and easier to deal with than ignore.
> optimize for the greater good
Greater good my posterior. The grandma was in the wrong place at that time because they optimised the experience to extract the most money out of the flying public. They were boarding the people who paid extra, and since she didn't they couldn't let her board. Because if they do why would anyone pay extra for their "higher class" more expensive tickets. They could have said "passport?" and then pointed her towards the gate. But doing so as a policy would net the corporation less profit. So they don't.
In other words the grandma's distress was by design. You can avoid the indignity of turned away from the gate by coughing up more money. She quite literally "didn't know her place" both in the queue and in the hierarchy.
>They were boarding the people who paid extra, and since she didn't they couldn't let her board. Because if they do why would anyone pay extra for their "higher class" more expensive tickets.
The class conflict/"corporate profit" angle doesn't make any sense because even in communism you'd still need to board people in different groups (eg. people who are disabled and/or need assistance first, then people at the back, all the way to the front), thereby creating the issue described in the OP.
It makes every sense. andsoitis claimed that the process is optimised for "greater good". My observation is that it is not. It is optimised for profit. That's it.
If there were some change they could enact which improves the "greater good" (whatever that is) at the cost of profit, they wouldn't. Simple as that.
> or need assistance first
yeah. Like a grandma with a tenuous command of the language and four kids. :)
> thereby creating the issue described in the OP.
I'm sure a fictional airport organised by other principles would have other problems. Doesn't change a bit that the current airport you can experience is optimised for profit, and not for "greater good".
>If there were some change they could enact which improves the "greater good" (whatever that is) at the cost of profit, they wouldn't. Simple as that.
Right, nobody thinks airports/airlines are altruistic organizations, but this specific complaint doesn't make any sense because the specific decision to board by sections is for the greater good. A moshpit where everybody boards at once benefits no one. In this case, "greater good" and "maximize profit" overlaps.
>yeah. Like a grandma with a tenuous command of the language and four kids. :)
Usually this would be handled by the airport, not the airlines. Moreover airports usually have criteria for which people can get assistance, and they can only help people that they think need assistance. It's easily to identify someone in a wheelchair, less easy to identify "grandma with a tenuous command of the language" without engaging in sterotyping/racial profiling.
The fact that airport staff are forced to be cattle dogs given the lack of airport prior capacity planning is exactly what the author is trying to convey.
It touches on a “race to the bottom” that European low cost carriers have have shown that people don’t care about airport stress in the shadow of cost — which lends to the enshittification of the whole overall experience.
It’s so bad that people are starting to /pay/ to have less stress by visiting airport lounges, which are now starting to be, themselves, overcrowded due to the increase in demand.[1]
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20260714133432/https://www.globa...
while your ignorance is bliss for you, it is a punishment for the rest of us. now get in line and wait for your boarding group to be called.
I think the point is that they have zero empathy
Airports by nature of flying being expensive will always be filled with people with zero idea about how airports work.
> b) hardly speaks English
> c) is in a foreign country
So you don't want tourists to your Country? You do realize 95% of the World lives outside the US? and at least 80% lives in non-English speaking Countries? Creating a horrid experience for them would mean losing huge chuck of that wealth flowing into your Country. Especially so when their income levels are rising drastically compared to a US Citizen (in terms of % change in disposable income as many are from low cost of living countries).
Dont try and glaze India and China please.
Also, EU speaks great English, the Nordic countries especially.
Reminds me of a really beautiful song by Nickel Creek, To The Airport: https://genius.com/Nickel-creek-to-the-airport-lyrics
There's a of implicit knowledge in that environment.
We do not need everyones bags to be scanned. We do not need everyones bodies to be scanned. We do not need facial recognition at TSA, to board international flights, and to enter the country. We do not need to ban cash at airports. We do not need to take off our shoes (ig that changed). We do not need to restrict liquids.
It's a bunch of baloney.
what? especially the bags part seems crazy. Easy to imagine what happens when we stop screening bags...
Replace "passengers" with "users" and replace "airport workers" with "product team members", and you have a good argument for why good usability and good service design really matter in the world.
I traveled in the flight for the first time 2 months back and I find this article so similar to my experience.
I had so much confusion on the entire protocols on what is allowed and what is not and all those terminologies, such that a week before travel, I had my friend do a full end-to-end guide on everything we must do since entering an airport to coming out of it.
Even then when I visited it, it was a little different than what my friend told me. But thankfully it is not a rushy airport, so I frankly told my situation to the person issuing boarding pass and he told me in detailed manner everything (my biggest confusion was with luggages).
Unlike a bus or train which you can at the worst case run through and board, for airplanes, you need to go through a lot of checkings and phew...
When in flight, there were a few instructions, messages from pilot etc. However they spoke so fast that it was so unclear. The passangers around me were also talking a little loudly, so I couldn't understand anything.
May be from what I understand, these instructions are so regular, so people who frequent flights find it boring.
For me it was both curiosity and feae of missing important details. And since it was India, they said the instructions in both English and Hindi only (I know only a little Hindi), even though the flights were for different language speaking region.
At the end, it somehow ended up fine. But I think if it were my parents in my place, the journey could have been a nightmare :)
Like, I hate the sheer size of Schiphol, but I’m never wondering where anything is, and if I need to get there I can always get there by sprinting. I like that part of it.
I hate airport. From having to arrive many hours early to a place out of the city and often poorly connected by public transport, expensive to park if you dare take your car, extremely expensive if you take a taxi or be left wherever if you take an uber. Then you have to find your way through huge, terminal to find your gate, understand the arbitrary rules of the airlines you were forced to choose, having your stuff messed with by security, having the constant pressure of time, only for the airline to be hours late with no compensation. And so many more.
Nowadays, if I can take a train, I take the train. At least where I live, the train stations are almost always in the city, very well-connected, are more comfortable, you can arrive very late at the train station since there is no gate, no security, no bullshit. And even if the trip is 3-4h longer with a train, you can make up for it by not having to show up minimum 1 hour early at the airport, then having to wait 1 hour for a slow bus that takes you from the airport to the actual city center, or take a taxi and give them all your life savings.
Yeah, airports are way too stressful. I'd honestly rather use a train to travel across a continent than use an airplane. The time saved just isn't worth the stress.
What’s crazy is that this is the list of things that are wrong when everything is going right.
I was at O’hare for the first time in a few decades a few weeks ago and my flight was delayed due to some mechanical issue with the assigned plane. At least that’s what the app said. Because of the delay, the gate kept changing. We were supposed to know this because every once in a while the gate we were at no longer said it was our flight, so there must be some other location. I think at least one of the times it was mentioned over the PA, but besides the flight number everything else was unintelligible.
We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving. It doesn’t matter that our tickets were from earlier in the day. They’ve already screwed over 150 passengers. Screwing them over more is far less bad than delaying them slightly but having to also delay later flights by a little bit, too. I think we watched three flights leave. As a group of six, with four children, the likelihood of standby coming through on any of these is less than zero.
On the departure board the flight was referred to by a carrier other than the one we bought the tickets from, because of course everyone should know every carrier’s partner airlines and how their flight numbers map.
Three hours of delay had arrived but the plane was finally at the gate. FAA says I’m entitled to a meal for the delay, so I go ask how to redeem it. I’m told to go back to customer service near security and stand in a line to get a voucher. But if I miss the flight, there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m sure that’s not how that’s supposed to work, but I’m several hours delayed already, my plans for the day are shot, missing the flight it really an option just so I can get some airport food.
The time has arrived to start boarding. I’m on chat complaining about the service when it disconnects. The app stops working, so I check the airline’s website, and get a hard down, unstyled error message. I tell my wife that something seems wrong with their site and have my suspicion confirmed a few minutes later that their entire system is down and all flights are halted until further notice. No ETA.
At this point Reddit has more information about what’s happening than the gate agent. It’s another 45 minutes before a mumbly PA announcement tells us flights are delayed due to a global system wide outage.
Fortunately, their IT staff seemed to be on it, and the whole thing only lasted an hour. Then they put us on the plane like nothing happened and even got people to cheer for the crap service. Ice water in hell, I suppose.
> We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving.
I feel like there is a lot more to the fungibility of planes. E.g. add just one more consideration, like bag loading, to the scenario and suddenly you end up with a mess of not great answers for a whole complex tree of things unless you somehow know with certainty how long the fix is actually going to take ahead of time. The more of these additional considerations you add, the more they start interacting with each other and the less likely "just switch the planes" only means passing the delay along.
That’s the airline’s concern. Imagine having a reservation at a restaurant and something happens to make the table unavailable. Should you wait for everyone else who made later reservations and all the walk ins who came while waiting you were waiting for your table to finish before getting seated? Your meal was already ruined, no sense in ruining the meals of everyone else?
What about hotel reservations, or literally any other thing you book ahead of time.
If a bus is taken out of service the people who were waiting for that stop at that time don’t go to the back of the line, they get the next bus. I’m sure airlines feel they are more sophisticated than public transit, but as a passenger I see little difference.
If you look at it just from a cost perspective, then you’re absolutely right. And that’s why everything sucks. If you look at it from a human perspective and design around customer service the end result would be different.
There’s been a bunch of airline IT meltdowns in recent years, some much much worse than what you described. Airlines just decided IT is a “cost center” and decided not to maintain it.
Absolutely! I travel a LOT, am able-bodied and frequent the same airports, and I am routinely confused and anxious.
Bad call-out to Heathrow though where they’re amongst the best in the world at this.
I flew out of JFK a few days ago. Delta has about 50 check-in kiosk, and a few gate agents. With so many terminals, I was wondering why the area was so packed, with ten-minute lines to use an check-in kiosk.
I went to see a gate agent because I had a question. Right after yelling at someone else for the same reason, they told me "No, you have to use the kiosks."
By the time I got to the check-in kiosks I figured it out. Maybe they worked for some people but it had to be like 20% at best. Everyone else had to have help, myself included. It wouldn't scan my passport for the first 5 attempts, and then it wouldnt print my bag tag so I had to see the agent anyways.
What is the purpose of an automated system that drives everyone to the manual system? It just added an extra step.
Sorry for venting.
The manufacturers and vendors who sold the non-working check-in kiosks profited. That reason alone is enough justification.
Post title should be, Dear people who design the airport, not Dear people who work at the airport.
other than the remarks about the signage, most of the post is about the employees.
Both
Funny. I love flying partly for the very reason that airports need to be idiot-proof.
Expectation is the source of frustration. Embrace the chaos, accept the journey.
The signage and rules can be confusing, but I don’t recall bad experiences with airport staff. They are just trying to do their job in a hectic place. I don’t believe they are intentionally being difficult, and honestly everyone can have a bad day.
I think a lot of the reason this generation is starting to become very pro-train is because of how fucking awful airports are
Everyone over 40 knows how terrible air travel has become.
I haven't flown in a few years, it was alright last time. But if my parents ever want to fly somewhere, I'm coming with them if only to tell them what to expect and help them around.
Everyone* knows how terrible air travel has become. People over 40 know it doesn't have to be that way.
Back then, the plebians did not fly as much as they do now.
I am a pleb and say this btw.
Why I’m glad spirit is dead.
Low cost economy was a mistake and shouldn’t exist. Half of all people shouldn’t be flying.
It's still like in the past days in Business class and upwards, not to mention private flying - all friendly, fully serviced, no nitpicking. Air travel has become more like transatlantic liners from the period just before their demise.
Business class is starting the enshittification ramp.
https://travelupdate.com/business-class-seat-selection-fee/
Wanna sit with your partner? Both of you, pay up! Lounge access? Oh, that's extra now.
Why does that logic not go the other way, too?
Don’t care about who you sit next to? Have a discount!
Suppose you operate an airline, and your costs increase (e.g. fuel, labor, etc). Your options are to divide the increase equally by number of seats, or you increase price differently based on customer’s ability and willingness to pay.
I do not see what is “wrong” about the latter. In fact, the latter would allow maintaining more access to air travel for those who can afford it the least.
I don’t care for airport lounges, why should I pay for them? Same for bigger seats, or checked bags, or alcoholic drinks, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
> I don’t care for airport lounges, why should I pay for them? Same for bigger seats, or checked bags, or alcoholic drinks, etc.
But they can, and will, always stretch this further than it should go.
It's like a restaurant that charges you extra for cutlery. Some cultures eat with their hands, and probably plenty of people would take a discount to do so. But it ruins the experience in the long term, and then the industry demands a bailout and we all get to pay more taxes for a shitty experience so they can buy back shares to boost the stock.
Eventually "basic economy" becomes a single iron maiden at the back of the plane used to punish the lowest-paying passenger for not knowing about its existence.
>But they can, and will, always stretch this further than it should go.
That is just an opinion. For example:
>It's like a restaurant that charges you extra for cutlery. Some cultures eat with their hands, and probably plenty of people would take a discount to do so. But it ruins the experience in the long term
My parents and family come from a culture that almost exclusively eats with their hands. It is so important to them that they actually say they do not feel like they have eaten unless they eat with their hands.
>and then the industry demands a bailout and we all get to pay more taxes for a shitty experience so they can buy back shares to boost the stock.
This is a separate topic about politics, not about the "right" or "wrong" nature of a business choosing how to price discriminate.
>Eventually "basic economy" becomes a single iron maiden at the back of the plane used to punish the lowest-paying passenger for not knowing about its existence.
Not according to any flight I have been on. I don't see the point of feeling outrage at something that hasn't happened. In my experience, basic economy is still just as clean and safe of a seat as the others, you get on the plane, sit down, and put headphones on or read a book or go to sleep. If they let me pay a lower price for that, great!
> Not according to any flight I have been on.
Are we just learning about future tense?
> In my experience, basic economy is still just as clean and safe of a seat as the others...
They are meaningfully less safe.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8412040/
"Economy class syndrome refers to the occurrence of thrombotic events during long-haul flights, mainly in economy class passengers."
>Why does that logic not go the other way, too?
Because the "sticker" price is prominently advertised, so advertising a lower price than nickel-and-diming up leaves a sour taste in people's mouths rather than advertising a higher price then offering a discount, even if the final prices are the same. Of course, everyone shops for flights on comparison websites, so their only metric is that sticker price, and airlines have to engage in this sort of stuff to be competitive.
What’s wrong is providing a floor that’s beneath human dignity.
Imagine if they charged extra for seat belts, or getting help evacuating after a crash. Some people would be willing to take the extra risk in exchange for paying less. You let more people access air travel. People who value safety can pay extra for more of it. There would be rightful outrage.
Something like lounge access is firmly in the realm of reasonable price discrimination. Charge extra, certainly! But something like charging extra to sit with your travel companions is bullshit. That sort of thing should be strongly rejected.
>Imagine if they charged extra for seat belts, or getting help evacuating after a crash.
Why? This isn't happening, and I can't figure out how it is productive to make up a scenario.
>But something like charging extra to sit with your travel companions is bullshit. That sort of thing should be strongly rejected.
Suppose a plane has seats in groups of 3s, and everyone on the plane is in a group of even number of people. Obviously, seating everyone together is impossible. As a seller, why is it "bullshit" to give the people that do not get to sit with their companion a lower price?
Ryanair threatened to make people pay for toilet usage.
Airlines are looking at standing seats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_seat), which would absolutely impact evacuation safety (mainly a concern of bandwidth through the aisle/doors) to save some ticket costs.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/05/ryanair-toi...
> Obviously, seating everyone together is impossible.
We manage it just fine at the movie theater, at sports stadiums, etc.
Sometimes you're one row behind. Sometimes the last person to book is in a weird spot. But largely, if you want to sit with your spouse, you'll be able to.
At a certain point, the bean counters have to be told no.
Movie theaters do charge to reserve seats now (at least by me), and sports stadiums have done that forever, as far as I know.
>Ryanair threatened to make people pay for toilet usage.
Ryanair says a lot of crap as part of their advertising strategy. It is ragebait/clickbait/etc. Eitherway, it's on the government to enforce basic standards.
>At a certain point, the bean counters have to be told no.
The government should ensure minimum standards (and sufficient competition in the market). Everything else, let the customers decide what they want or do not want to pay for.
Buyer Beware and Let The Market Decide is a terrible way to structure society.
> Movie theaters do charge to reserve seats now…
"Other people are also enshittifying" is not the argument you think it to be. (It's not the case in my area, incidentally.)
You asserted it couldn't be done. I quote:
> Obviously, seating everyone together is impossible.
The only reason my hypothetical doesn’t happen is because it’s literally illegal. Your scenario doesn’t happen because solo travelers exist and you don’t get an entire plane full of pairs.
Other than TSA, air travel seems better to me than the 1990s.
I don’t need meals for domestic flights, and it’s trivial for me to pack a little something. Noise canceling earphones and ipads/laptops/phones make entertaining oneself trivial.
There is even wifi now, and messaging is free so you can be in constant communication with your friends/family, especially to coordinate pickup.
The planes themselves are better (except maybe if you are a big person). But price per hour of flight time for me has stayed below inflation, so I assume the extra seats helps offset that for me.
I can buy flights anywhere, anytime on my electronic devices, have the boarding passes on my watch or phone or paper, and I can get push notifications about all flights so pickups/dropoffs are simple. I can even see the status of the plane’s previous flight so I get even more of a heads up about delays. There is also luggage tracking available now, at least with airtags if not from the airline itself.
All good and valid points. Yet I still have the impression airports are passenger hostile, e.g. try to find a water dispenser without walking a mile.
"Other than TSA" sounds to me very much like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
In the early 1990s, my girlfriend was scared of flying. I went with her to the gate for emotional support. I also sometimes met people when they arrived at the gate. No longer, at least, not without some planning.
In the early 1990s, full names and id checks were not required. This made for an active resale market which has since disappeared, with the profit going to the airliners. My mother and I share the same first initial, which proved personally useful one time when we booked the ticket as "E. Smith" since we weren't sure which of us was going make the trip. No longer.
In the 1990s, from drop-off to gate in the small city I lived was about 5 minutes, for carry-on. Check-in at the gate by showing the ticket. The only inspection was for guns. I regularly carried a pocket knife back then, even on planes. No longer.
In the early 2000s I traveled international. My carry-on at times included bottles of beer (to share with people in Europe) and wine (returning from South Africa), since I thought that would be safer than in my luggage. I bought them in regular stores. No longer.
Around 2008 I made the mistake once of returning international via SFO to visit friends there. I knew where they lived - I've driven there many times. But I didn't know their zip, only their street address, and there was no way for me to check in the new automated kiosk without that vital piece of useless information. I was able to look it up, but I was flustered and in panic that I would miss the flight.
Back in the 1990s, as US citizen I could just show up in most countries, with only my passport - no visa, no fingerprinting, no automated facial recognition, and no "electronic system for travel authorization" or rather its foreign equivalents.
It even worked the other way. I had friends of mine from South Africa going to Canada for a conference, with a transfer in the US. They didn't know they were supposed to get a US visa even though they didn't leave the airport. But the US at the time did have the TWOV (Transit Without Visa) program, which meant they were able to get to the conference and back home. They even had a comfortable TWOV room at the airport, and an escort for those who needed to step outside for a smoke. The TWOV program was suspended in 2003 and has not been restored.
Air travel in the 1990s felt like freedom. Now it feels like a key part of modern government security and control, with little leeway for humanity.
And the generations who remember how air travel used to be are dying off. In a few decades, there will be nobody left who knows how good it could be if we stopped deliberately making it shitty.
I'm over 40, and I flew many times before 9/11. Nope, flying has gotten much easier. The entire experience, from getting to the airport and parking to getting to your hotel. Yes, TSA is a drag, but I've never had an issue. And since I got PreCheck, it's gotten easier. Altogether, I enjoy flying.
I've just hit 2 million miles last week.
All of this is true, and no matter how much you do it, it's still all true.
I can't even keep track of what I'm supposed to do at my own home airport that I've been to thousands of times. Some people know me on a first name basis there, and still act judgmental when something was (seemingly randomly) changed and I don't know about it.
TSA is by far the worst in the USA though. Their expectation that you do exactly what you should, without telling you what to do, while constantly changing the rules, is infuriating. Often there'll be 2-3 lines and DESPITE HAVING THE SAME SCANNERS, they'll have different unspoken rules that you are literally yelled at over.
My theory is that it's intentional; change the rules for security personnel so they don't end up in a routine, change them for travelers so... they also don't end up in a routine. If travelers with malicious intent are stressed because of the lack of predictability, they'll be extra stressed when they're up to no good.
Of course, this is baby/bathwater territory as only a fraction of a percentage of people are up to no good, and of those only a percentage is a danger to others.
As with many things, criminals are a step ahead and know this and know how to keep calm, be patient.
i made this point earlier but in a TSA line do you not just watch the people in front of you and do what they're required to do? That works pretty well for me.
Yes, that. You have 3-10 chance to watch and learn before it's your turn. But down the phone or book and spend a moment observing.
I will do almost anything to avoid flying, at least short haul. I don’t mind flying: I have no fear of it at all in fact. But I absolutely despise the airport experience, and consider it to be so unpleasant as to be worth avoiding whenever it’s at all feasible to travel by other means.
> we passengers are trying our best
100% disagree.
I mean, almost by definition half of the time people are going through an airport, it's not their home airport. Probably more than half because people chain trips (and even more than that if you count people with a layover). It would make sense for the default assumption when interacting with a visitor is that they've never been there before and are unaware of your procedures.
My observation is that on average, the world is too complex and confusing for the vast majority of people to operate in it without significant struggle.
I feel differently, after travelling a bit all the airports are so cookie cutter I was in awe of the human effort required to reach this point of harmony.
It's all so organized and simple and zero need to rush. They even have signs in all major languages, it's nuts!
Source: SF, Miami, New York, Bolivia, Argentina, Texas - all kind of the same all over. Like visiting different Wawa's.
>The poor elderly Indian woman who you just told to "keep the gate area clear" does not, and she wasn't trying to make your life more difficult
We need to go back to when flying was for the elites only.
For the climate, of course.
Thus but unironically.
In Montreal airport few months ago, going through the TSA check: shoes off, laptop out in a separate bin etc etc then the giant rotating MRI, I mean xray, then at the end they took my carry on for further inspection, after waiting for around 30min for my turn, it turned out because I have half full bottle of water.. I told him to toss it and just hand me the bag, he refused, and asked me to wait another 15min, then he escorted me before the TSA check point, and told me to pour the water in specific garbage/container, I did, and he left me with bag open at the beginning, so I put everything inside and wanted to pass the TSA, the guys who just saw me being escorted from the inside, refused to let me pass without doing the whole check again, so, shoes off, rotating xray, etc etc, and this time plus extra manual search or whatever it’s called, maybe because I dared to challenge their authority. The whole process took around an hour, for a half full bottle of water I bought from the airport.
This not the only story, there are many stories, like the one time they politely asked me to keep my bag at the front door of the airplane because there’s no enough space (I found inside people with three pieces tho), silly me I thought I will take it when I leave only to find they checked it, and the rest of the trip I was left with nothing but my passport (luckily I had it with me or I will be stranded), only to find some of my stuff got stolen from my bag and a broken laptop.
The first story however is the symbolization of the infamous Canadian bureaucracy in anything government wise, what something could be solved in one step quickly, gets convoluted with so many steps because who ever designed them is either out of touch of reality and needs to touch some grass, or just straight up moron, the same applies for hospitals ER btw, it’s not “short staff” as they claim, it’s just a poor process design.
> Upon seeing this, the experienced visitor to this sceptred isle knows to smartly turn on their heel because B45 is right behind them, but we occasional travellers don't.
Railways aren't much better. German railways are bad enough, but Eastern Europe... good luck even finding a realtime track schedule, and screw you if you don't speak the language. Last time in Rijeka there was construction going on but no indications anywhere, my fellow travellers were lucky I spoke Croatian and recognized that the attendant was shouting in Croatian for the people on what should have been a train...
Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lot of systems do a bad to terrible job of accommodating people who are unfamiliar with them.
It also doesn't help when so many countries (and even cities) have totally different systems for paying, etc. Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others. And, no, having to scour guidebooks (of possibly outdated info), for all the right incantations for a given locale isn't really satisfactory.
>Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others
The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.
Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.
>Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.
My observation is that's improved a lot in some cases. But I remember I was traveling somewhare on UK trains, and between receipts and tickets for trains after a change, I had this sheaf of cards that my friend and I were rifling through to get on a train (with a short connection) and it wasn't at all obvious what we needed to feed into the turnstyle with people getting annoyed behind us.
You come to Croatia for cheap holidays and are surprised not all works as you're used to.
German service providers absolutely don't care if you don't speak German and will take that extra step to make sure you get the message.
> You come to Croatia for cheap holidays and are surprised not all works as you're used to.
I speak the language. The thing I'm annoyed is is that tourist destinations should be better prepared for, well, tourists showing up!
Croatian tourism strategy is bumping prices of what they already have to Swiss level, and seeing who is still willing to show up.
While I found this rant mostly annoying:
> When we try to find gate B45, we encounter the following sign:
(see board with 2 B45 gates)
Well, yes. This is wrong. And confusing. But mostly wrong
When article says "..it's actually behind you" that leads me to believe that if you're staring at those signs then you're actually at B45. I'm not sure off the top of my head how you'd put B45 on those signs in a clear way. If B45 is at the intersection of two hallways then it really shouldn't be on either sign but then where should it be?
You'd need a segregated entry for B45, or just omit it entirely
This is currently the #4 story on the home page, an article about someone complaining about not being able to figure out an airport. This must be why the standard recommendation is to get to the airport 2 hours(!) before your flight.
Can I recommend something concrete every time something like this happens to you?
1. Use ChatGPT (or similar) to make a fun and attractive greetings card image that is a farcical representation of the situation.
2. Use MoonPig.com (or similar) to send it through the real/royal mail to someone important (but not the CEO) at the company that has annoyed you.
This need not cost more than $6. That's almost certainly less than 1% the cost of the long haul flight that this happened on.
Everything you describe is likely a function of the CFO being allowed to treat the savings they can find as if they are a profit centre. It is incumbent upon those of us that can see a better way to demonstrate that the 5p per flight that the CFO optimised annoyed some customers enough to spend real time bringing it to someone's attention.
The first time I did this I effectively received over $2,000 from my airline of choice (though the path to that was convoluted). Most people don't react well to being told they are wrong. Use your intellect and industry to show them a better way in a positive and friendly way.
You will usually get better results and by spreading more positivity in the world will likely feel happier too.