David J.
Danto
Business travel
thoughts in my own, personal opinion
eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD
“It’s Worse…”
September was an interesting month for me – I was home. It was honestly the first full month that I haven’t been on a
business trip in as long as I could remember.
There were a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, a few of the events I was going to attend were cancelled. Secondly, I didn’t care. I’ve come to realize that my lifetime million-miler
status on United is the best I’m ever going to do, and I no longer care to play
the bait-and-switch loyalty game, so it’s the first September I can remember
that I didn’t know and didn’t care about my mileage / spending totals for the
year to date. (It’s so much easier to cynically
assume that every email and letter from United and the other airlines is just a
lie and ignore them. I’ve never had as
many airline credit card bonus offers as I have since I stopped using them.) So when I jumped in a car to the airport
early in October, it had been such an unusual gap that I had forgotten how bad
everything had become. I was quickly
reminded.
Nothing gets one slapped-back into reality as quickly as
Newark airport. Of course my gate was in
the C2 wing – as far away from the clubs I’m paying for as possible. I’ve detailed many
times before how galling the current EWR club
situation is, but it’s still amazing how oblivious to the optics United is when
they invite a paying club member to “reserve
and pay for” their super-secret Classified restaurant at EWR – the one they set up as opposed to fixing the club
situation I’ve already paid for.
However that was just the icing. The EWR experience
has been made worse by every single change they’ve made there. The customer friendly moving walkways are
gone, replaced in many places with restaurants / bars that create people flow
choke-points between you and your gate.
The comfortable seating has been replaced with hard chairs that are
bolted to the ground in front of tables, meaning they can’t be moved for larger
people, pregnant people, people with luggage, and people just not comfortable
being that close to a table.
When you do get on the plane, of course the IFE system is
either gone or broken and ignored. Passenger
comfort – especially on the airlines’ “premium service” used to be a
priority. Not anymore. Now it’s about as low down on the list as it
can go. In SFO,
while in-line with about five minutes before boarding, the passengers were told
“the personal entertainment system and
WiFi is broken, so download some movies now” – which apparently didn’t faze
any of the United staff. It was OK to just say that and move on. (To their credit, the often useless United
Twitter team saw my tweet about it and offered me a travel voucher as
compensation. It was a refreshing
surprise, but I couldn’t help but think about the other passengers who didn’t
tweet that received nothing.)
Then – as long as I’m already talking about SFO – let’s take a second to discuss how bad things have
become there. The people running this
airport seem to put passengers needs dead last on their priority list, totally forgetting
that they are managing a public owned facility supposedly in the public
interest. It’s not just that they schedule
runway work that disrupts travel for a month; it’s not just that the gates there were
renumbered in the middle of the night with no warning; but there is now an ‘optics
over substance’ campaign to remove plastic
water bottles, ostensibly to help the environment. I generally support positive environmental
conservation, but not in this case. We
already travel with more stuff than will fit in ever shrinking carry-on spaces,
so burdening travelers with just another inconvenience is a slap in the face. The airport already overprices everything for
sale, and provides many recycling locations, so they could easily find another
way to manage a sound reuse of the plastic collected – yet they don’t. The glass and metal bottles they’ve put forth
as a substitution don’t pack as easily, are heavier, and in some cases
dangerous. But those would be logical
reasons to do the right thing. I suspect
doing the right thing wasn’t as important to this airport’s management team as
being perceived to be doing the right thing.
Just take a look below at the plastic container of sushi and the plastic
iced tea bottle I had for lunch there.
There is no effort being made to eliminate these plastics – with the
plastic clamshell being one of the most passenger inconvenient methods of
providing food at an airport (because it leaks and is not easily packed for
on-board use.) That would have been a
great place to start, as it would have been in-line with passenger convenience. In addition, as you can see from the photo
below, there are still plenty of plastic water bottles for sale – the big
ones. Only the small, convenient to pack
ones have been eliminated.
I think we all have to peel the onion on what’s going on here
– why only some plastics have been removed – the most convenient ones, as the inconvenient
ones haven’t – and what are the sourcing and economic factors behind the new
metal bottle supplier. My gut tells me
that if it walks like a plastic duck and quacks like a plastic duck that
something other than ‘good for the
environment’ is going on.
In the future I’ll have to try very hard not to take any more
long gaps between trips, lest my mind allow me to again think that the
experience is as special and exciting as it was years ago. Today, the requirement is to think about how
travel used to be, and then just remember it’s far worse than that.
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.