Why add the words"with service" to the announcement?
If you got sometin’ to say, just say it, okay?
The fight has been delayed, or moved to a new gate—okay, I get it, stuff happens.
But I’m flying to Houston, or Denver, or Columbus or Toronto.
I am definitely NOT flying to SERVICE anywhere.
I don’t wanna hear about your damn “service”. It debases the English language.
That is all.
Carry on.
I always think it’s a little bit concerning. What!? You can’t categorically commit to my plane actually reaching it’s destination, just giving “service” to it. Like we’ll give it the ol college try, but no guarantees you’ll reach the city we are heading to
I was waiting for my flight to board yesterday and at one point four announcements were playing simultaneously. It wasn’t a grammar issue though. I think.
Patrick Smith, of Cockpit Confidential, agrees with you:
But what really gets my blood aboil? After takeoff, when they’re certain they have a captive audience, airlines have the f***king gall to try to sell us all credit cards. I always feel sorry for the cabin crew, having to go along with this awful nonsense. I consider this abuse of both passengers and crew.
Apart from that, it really disappoints me when an industry seemingly can’t make a living doing what they do. Airlines are no longer in the business of flying planes - they exist to sell credit cards according to some of what I’ve read. Just as gas stations are really in the mini-mart business and movie theaters have supposedly never made their money from movies, but rather concessions. It all seems very sad and dishonest.
PA announcements in an airport make the kid on the other end of the Jack in the Box speaker sound like a champion elocutionist. It might as well be one of the adults from a Peanuts cartoon. Just put the info up on the gate screen that I compulsively glance at every 30 seconds.
I’ve been flying since the late 1950s, and I don’t think those announcements ever changed. I think the wording comes from the passenger train “service” days, and nobody bothered to update it. I can think of worse things in this world.
I always assumed that “service to” meant that the plane or whatever wasn’t going there, but if you were going there you needed to take that plane in order to get to a place where you could get a plane that does go there; or maybe that the final destination of the plane was X but enroute it stopped at (had service to) A, B, and C.
Neither of those is so?
No, you are wrong. In the entire world, There is nothing, nothing, nothing worse.
How many thousands of people, (probably hundreds of thousands over the past 80 years of flying) have all participated in perpetuating this travesty of grammar and common sense?
And nobody has had the courage to speak up.
Where will it end???
“First they came for the airline announcers…”
“with service” puts a break between the numbers and the word “to” in order to make it easier for people to understand. You don’t want to follow the number 2 with the word to. Otherwise, you get something like this:
I assume that it is short for “We are Flight XXXX, resistance is futile, your culture will adapt to service us, in Denver”.
The digit ‘two’ is pronounced the same way as the preposition ‘to’. With the background noise and distortion of a PA system, clarity is more important than grammatical perfection.
@Bear_Nenno and @Ancient_Nerd have rung the bell and are entitled to choice of cigar or coconut.
However nonsensical the phrase “with service” may be, it’s more user-friendly than immediately following a spoken flight number with the word “to” that can be mistaken for “2”.
I propose the following compromise: Change the standard wording to “Flight XXXX serving Destination City”.
hegehehehegehe @leahcim
I accept that they need some stuff to break things up, but they can do a lot better.
Flight number xxxx, which is going to city yyyyy.
Flight number xxxx, now traveling to city yyyy
Flight number xxxx, next landing in city yyyy, followed by zzzz
and so on.
Thank you! My quibble about this construction has always been that saying “Flight ABC with service to XYZ” implies that the flight is something separate from the service.
No, the flight IS the service.
George Carlin had a whole bit about airline-speak. LIke, “we will now begin the boarding process”. Why is it a “process”? Why aren’t you just boarding the plane? And then there’s “pre-boarding”. What is that? You get to board before you board? Apparently it’s for “passengers with small children”. But Carlin wants to know, what about passengers with large children? 
And so on …
Airports are not always in the city limits of the cities they serve. Your flight might be going to East Elmhurst or Avoca or Jamaica, but it’s still going to airports serving the cities of New York, Scranton or New York (again)
Same here. I actually complained to the airline about this once. Their response was that since I was a frequent flyer I’ve heard the spiel so many times, but other customers really appreciated hearing about the great offers that were available. i’ll complain again one day
It makes me nostalgic for bus travel (seriously!).
“Scenicruiser service to Dubuque, Des Moines, Council Bluffs and Omaha now ready for boarding at gate number…2. `All aboard, and thank you for going Greyhound.”
The “with service to …” announcements are something that I’ll always intimately associate with train travel, the announcement echoing through the huge cathedral-like train station! I’ve never heard it in an airport, and in fact for years now there have been no flight announcements at all IIRC. You’re just expected to know your flight time and gate. It might be different at smaller airports, but at large ones there are so many flights that announcing each one would just result in a constant barrage of noise.
This is the answer, IMHO. It separates the flight number from the destination.
Also, not everyone knows their flight number.* But everyone knows their destination. Saying “with service to” cues the listener that “the important part is coming!” Along with that is the fact that people tend to miss the beginning of announcements—because they’re not paying attention, or they can’t get the person they’re talking to shut up, etc.
*I just got back from a trip which included flights from Boston to Istanbul to Cappadocia, back to Istanbul, on to Copenhagen, then back to Boston. Without looking at my phone, I never knew my flight number. I did know my destination for each flight.