David J.
Danto
Business travel
thoughts in my own, personal opinion
eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD
Traveling Dreams And Nightmares
I’ve been traveling for business all my life – and
have the million-miler distinction to prove it. However, there are still a
fairly large number of things that I haven’t experienced in my travels. I have no shame in admitting that – my
experiences are just what my circumstances required.
I’ve never
flown in international first class on a three or four class aircraft – as I
would never charge a client for that perk when coach (or business when I need
to sleep) is good enough; I never flew Concorde – for many of the same reasons;
and I had never flown on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” – until this week.
Now as my
regular readers will already know, I’m no fan of the current iteration of
United Airlines. They (and honestly most
US airlines) have totally lost sight of the fact that they work in a service
industry. Their services are generally
miserable experiences, with increased customer spending and stature only
achieving perks that are ‘less miserable’ as opposed to good or great. In fact, during my travels this week – while
waiting to board a delayed flight – I started to jot-down the “Stages Of Dread” of a United frequent flyer:
1. Booking the only available flight
instead of where or when you wanted to go
2. Reserving the only available seat
instead of the one you’d want
3. Realizing your upgrade didn’t clear
4. Watching the seatmap
in their app as the empty center seat next to you is filled
5. Having that center-seat occupant show
up and be one of the people in the dreaded passenger category (too
large/tall/odorous/talkative/ etc.)
6. Having a ‘mechanical’ delay for an
unidentified (and likely preventable) reason
7. Having the mechanical above force
everyone to deplane
8. Having your flight cancelled
My flights
on a business trip this week only achieved up to a six on the dread list above,
but they gave me my first United Dreamliner experience.
The return
trip started with one of the few connecting itineraries I ever need to
fly. As the area I was in was experiencing
high winds, I knew I’d need to actively manage the day’s travel planning. I only had a scheduled a 90 minute connection
– which for United - believe me - is considered very tight, but it was the only
itinerary I could book. I was able to
leave my meeting early enough to catch the 11:40am departure instead of my
scheduled 1:30pm departure. Already the
9:55 departure was delayed about 40 minutes due to the wind, so I figured –
despite everything else deceptively showing as on-time – there would be a series
of cascading delays.
The earlier
flight I took left late and arrived late but earlier than if I had taken my
later flight showing as on time but of course would never be. (If you’re a business traveler you understand
that sentence. Apologies to everyone
else. Naturally, my originally scheduled
first leg was just landing at a gate nowhere the connecting flight when we had
already started boarding – so that bullet was dodged.)
I therefore
found myself boarding my first 787-10 in SFO on the
way back to EWR.
Hopefully this will be my last experience on one of these awful planes.
The United
Dreamliner is configured with four classes – Polaris, Premium Economy, Economy
Plus and Coach. I was in an Economy Plus
aisle seat (again, not wasting my employer’s or client’s money on perks.) The aircraft has some nice technology – like
seatback screens with all seat controls on-screen, and ‘dimmable’ internal
window shades, but the negatives far outweigh the positives. Not only are the E+ seats narrow, the aisles
are the narrowest I’ve ever experienced on a two-aisle plane. It is impossible for the average person to
walk in the aisle without bumping into other seated passengers, and as I sat in
my seat I was wacked by passengers and carts for the whole flight. How any modern wide-body jet can be ordered
in a configuration that makes the 737 look ‘roomy’ is beyond me. Walking past the Premium Economy seats, to me
they looked more like a joke than a perk.
Slightly bigger seat-back screen, mechanical foot-rest, slightly wider
seat. Big whoop. The restrooms were too
few and too hard to get to as well.
This
aircraft – touted
with much hype when it came out – met none of the promises – at least not
for me. It wasn’t bigger or more
spacious, it wasn’t quieter than other flights (in fact I found it quite loud –
with the engine noise almost drowning
out the dueling crying babies), it was a very shaky / bumpy ride for a plane of
this size (far worse than the 777), and it wasn’t a generally nicer experience
in any way. I also found the fuselage to
severely limit cellular signals while on the ground, and as far as in the air
is concerned – the WiFi of course didn’t work at all (but that I’m sure is a
typical United problem, not one of the aircraft design.) The FAs kept apologizing and saying we could
keep trying, but it never worked for anyone.
I suppose,
in this day and age, I should be grateful that the plane was generally safe to
fly (after
initial battery incidents) and not nosediving due to faulty design and/or
software. But if arriving alive is truly
now the only measure of the airline industry then we certainly need to stop and
look at what has become of how the publically owned sky and
airports are being managed and in whose interest.
This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal
opinions.
All image and links provided above as reference under
prevailing fair use statutes.