As reported here, I had difficulty getting out of Tucson on Friday night. But I was finally able to get home — and hey, my baggage arrived today, so there’s that good news to report too.

After my last post about this travel imbroglio, the airline powers-that-be decided that they didn’t have the necessary equipment on-hand at Tucson airport to fix the plane. So here’s what they did instead:  They canceled my flight. Personally, I don’t care about specific flights or flight numbers — that’s their business — I just want to be on a plane that takes me where I need to go in a reasonable timeframe. But that wasn’t going to be, either:  By the time they could get me to Phoenix, I would have missed my connecting flight. And so would the other 60 or so of us who were going to be on this little cloudhopper of a plane. So then they decided this:

They would BUS us to Phoenix.

Here’s what I posted on my Facebook wall: OK, the plane is worse-off than thought. Now they’re going to BUS us to Phoenix. Welcome to the 1940s. Best response from a Facebook friend, courtesy of my friend Alan in San Diego:  “How William Inge.”

And y’know what? I was still fine with that. Again, not delighted, but not upset — hey, planes malfunction. I get it. By all means, fix it. But then the gate agent did some funny things:

1. The “bus” became “a series of shuttles,” each of which “holds nine people.” And it didn’t sound like I was going to be one of those nine people, because:
2. He read out a litany of canceled destinations those   shuttles would be servicing, and while it was a long list, it somehow didn’t include Burbank, and because:
3. When I asked about this, he said, “You never know. Maybe some of these people with tickets have already given up, and we’ll be able to get you on a shuttle. Just hang out.”

That was the point at which I called the client whose travel agency had booked me on the flight. Once he understood my situation, he called me back almost instantaneously (thank you!) to say that I was now on a United flight headed to Los Angeles. I walked two gates over and picked up a boarding pass from the friendly and rather more competent-seeming gate agent at United.

But first I asked USAirways about my baggage. I don’t like to check bags — I make a point of traveling with two carry-ons:  my laptop bag and a small rolling suitcase — but for this trip I’d had to check the suitcase because I had to carry on an LCD projector. I also checked the Bose speakers that go with it. For the fee of $110 roundtrip. The USAirways gate agent told me that my baggage was already on a plane, to Burbank. So I got on my new flight, to Los Angeles, and when I disembarked there I shared a cab back to the Burbank airport with another inconvenienced passenger who was supposed to be on my flight, an executive from Hilton. She bemoaned how much worse air travel had become, and wished it would go back the way it was 10 years ago. Here’s what I told her:

Forget it. The good old days aren’t coming back. Real or imagined, the threat of terrorism has thrown major maddening slowdowns in the way of getting onto a plane. But the bigger problem is the airline price war. We’ve all enjoyed the lower fares, but we’re paying the price in other ways:  in airlines that purposely overbook (it’s cheaper to provide a voucher or two than have a plane lift off with open seats), that don’t feed  you, that don’t offer enough gate agents, that don’t stock enough spare parts, that charge to take luggage.

And it’s not just the airlines:  It’s Home Depot (good luck finding customer service or help of any kind); it’s deteriorating roads and bridges (because we don’t have enough tax revenue to maintain them); it’s failing schools (here in Los Angeles the school district and the teachers just agreed to cut another week off the school year as a budget-saving device because the state is, again, “borrowing” education funding); it’s your credit card company (charging higher fees for shorter due dates). It’s everywhere. And we’ve allowed it. We’re not mad enough. In fact, even at the end of this, I somehow couldn’t summon the high dudgeon some small part of my brain told me I was entitled to. No, I expected bad service. I expected that they wouldn’t get me on another flight in time, and I certainly expected my checked bags — which I paid $110 to check — not to arrive Friday night, no matter what they told me. And I was right:  They arrived today, Sunday. Friday night what I got was a phone call:  “Hello, this is Tucson airport. Um… we seem to still have your bags here from a canceled flight…?”  In other words — no, the bags were not already loaded onto the plane, as the gate agent had said.

What finally — finally — pissed me off? When the baggage agent in Burbank told me no, they couldn’t deliver them — I’d have to come pick them up. It made no difference when I pointed out that it would cost me up to $30 to park at the airport to “run in” to get them. Evidently, delivery of your bags when they’ve fucked up is another service they’ve cut.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.