Anyone else remember flying PeoplesExpress Airlines? Pay cash, on the flight.
In the late 70s some high-school friends in the Bay area took Hughes Airwest to SFO-LAX on a whim to go to a restaurant. It was something like $20/seat.
I had to fly them from Newark to Columbus when I visited our factory there. The waiting room made “The Day After” look like a Sunday School picnic. Didn’t pay on the plane though, since our travel agency did it.
I did pay on the plane when I flew the Eastern Shuttle from Boston to LGA. And they even gave you a bagel. No reservations. (This was like 1972.)
When my daughter worked for an airline and we could fly standby for almost nothing, I reserved at the desk all the time. You were usually not guaranteed a seat, so they gave you a pseudo-boarding pass to get through security. My daughter could check on loads, so we usually got on. When her father was sick, my wife flew from SFO to Philadelphia all the time on United, and found that the first flight in the morning almost always had seats available.
In 2017, I (pretty much) did this when flying from Cyprus to NYC on Aeroflot. There was a problem with our Russian visas, so I just said, “Give me a couple seats to JFK.” Can’t say we planned it.
The first time I flew the shuttle from Newark to Boston, way back in 1973, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the pilot had to look out for pterodactyls on the runway, there were people who actually boarded the plane without a ticket. They paid the stewardess* in cash. Utterly unbelievable, even (to me) back then.
By the next time I flew you couldn’t do that anymore. But you could still buy tickets at the counter for that very day.
- yes, a stewardess. Not yet a Flight Attendant.
I bet it was. As an FYI, the people at the Bristol airport are the best. They’ve helped me with lost luggage, chatted with me as I waited for my transportation to arrive, and told me great stories of windy landing after I experienced one. Wow, it can be scary landing and taking off there. The winds are really something.
I think I did it once a few decades ago, for reasons I no longer remember. These days, even if I was at the airport, I’d use my phone!
Now that pretty much every airline uses automated kiosks for checking in, I wonder if it’s possible to also purchase a ticket from the kiosk. I’ve never looked to see if that function was available, and nowadays I pretty much always check in on my computer or phone.
The Eastern Shuttle was a remarkable product of a much different time. Not only could you walk up and buy a ticket in cash, but for awhile, if the plane was full, the airline would actually roll up a second plane for the overflow passengers. (I think the spare planes were 1950s-era DC-6s that for some reason Eastern hadn’t mothballed yet.)
Parents had friends who were snowbirds. They did this on the Return Trip from HellTM. Returning from FL, with a car full of stuff their car caught fire on I-95 in northern FL. A trucker stops & helps pull their stuff from the car. FD comes & puts out the fire. Now what? No car & a bunch of clothes on the side of the road. Trucker gives them a suggestion & helps them carry it out. He drives them to Wal-mart where they buy new, cheap luggage & throw all of their stuff in it & get a taxi to the airport.
Didja know who else tends to buy last minute one-way fares & has new, cheap luggage? Drug smugglers, that’s who! They got the extra, extra search by security.
Then the plane got diverted so they still had a multi-hour drive home. Like I said, Return Trip from HellTM
Shortly before my grandmother died, my mom called me one Friday while I was at work and said that I needed to come that weekend to say my goodbyes; Gramma was in hospice, and fading fast.
So, I drove from work to the airport, bought a ticket from Ft. lauderdale to Orlando, then cabbed it more than an hour to Daytona. I had no luggage or carry on possessions with me, which triggered some funny looks from security.
(And mom was correct. My grandmother was only lucid for a few minutes, shortly before I had to return home, but she told me “I’m so glad you came”. Her death, as I recall, was only days later).
…
I’ve also bought impromptu tickets at the airport for work reasons. I’ve occasionally had to fly out of town for court hearing; because you don’t know how long the court appearance will last, you tend to err on the side of caution and book the latest return trip. I’ve had times where I’ve finished early, so me and the other lawyers tried to find a new flight home without having to wait around in the airport for hours.
I once represented a guy who was transporting luggage full of random mismatched clothes and about $100,000 in cash. During a layover in Arizona, the money was seized under civil forfeiture laws that triggered an obligation for him to prove that he had a legitimate source of the money.
That case is on appeal.
I seriously hate civil forfeiture laws.
I’ve never bought a ticket at the ticket counter, but once when I missed my connection in Frankfurt Lufthansa rebooked me on a United flight. I assume in United’s computer system it looked as if I’d bought a last minute, one way, international flight, because that was the one time in my life I got the extra security check.
Bristol Airport is actually a client of mine. My clients have told me that the airport was built during WWII for the RAF as a training centre, because the wind made it really challenging for take off and landings. That explains a lot!
Good Lord - it costs me nearly £50 to get from south London to Heathrow. How much does a cab from Bristol cost?
About £200. So about the same as a train fare at 9am on a Monday morning.
Did this once. Flew in to Detroit for my connecting flight and found out a flight back home had seats available and was leaving in 30 minutes (I was at the gates so didn’t have to go through TSA). There was a fee to change from my reserved flight leaving in 3 hours - best $50 I’ve speant.
I once walked up to an airline counter in Bangkok Thailand and said “What island can I fly to tonight?”. An hour later I was on a flight to Koh Samui with one night’s accommodations, the bulk of my luggage in a locker back in Bangkok, and a return flight ticket in 5 days.
Of course, then I got pneumonia and spend 3 days in Samui Hospital, but that’s a story for another day.
Yeah but their alternative of having me wait with fingers crossed for the afternoon flight to Schiphol and risk having to put me up for the night because the coastal weather wasn’t supposed to get better and pay me some satisfaction for having messed with my schedule? Trust me, this was the cheaper option.
I once had a shuttle flight from BWI to one of the DC airports cancelled (don’t look at me like that - I didn’t book it) and they just stuck us in a cab to get our connecting flights. Took about an hour, which wasn’t much longer than taking the plane would have been - the actual flight would have been only 20 minutes but there’s all the other faffing involved.