Or am I just expecting too much? I guess if people are still going on vacation, and the hotels and airlines are profiting it’s working well enough, but Christ-on-a-cracker it’s a pain to get anywhere now. As I’ve stated here before, I almost always manage my own damned self when traveling. I fly myself, drive myself, and frequently have my own house (RV) so I can ensure my needs are met. But work and time constraints have pushed me into the standard Airline->Rental Car->Hotel framework, and it seems worse than I remember.
A recent weeklong business trip brought the following headaches:
Multiple gate changes prior to departure, resulting in scampering back and forth until the damned airline settled on one.
Airline losing my seat assignment, then putting me in middle-seat steerage. And charging me extra for trying to fix it via phone.
Another graphic lesson about Jean-Paul Sartre’s quotes* while dealing with personal space, reclining assholes, and crowded conditions on the plane itself.
Rent car agency screwed up, refused our company’s discounts causing a delay.
Hotel room not ready.
Advertised Wifi too slow to be usable (unless it was 3am)
Room wasn’t cleaned some days (front desk answer: “Yeah, sometimes they don’t”)
In-room coffee maker broke (twice). Refused to issue another and kept giving me parts to try and fix it.
Insanely loud, piercing fire alarm goes off twice. Resulting in hurried trips into the freezing parking lot, and interrupted sleep.
“Complimentary” breakfast late (causing rush to morning meetings)
Return flight didn’t go to the advertised terminal (DFW), resulting in another 30 minutes securing transport back to my damned car before I could go home.
As far as I can tell, all my money flowed to the various businesses on time and uninterrupted, and all the dollars were complete and usable. I held up my end of this bargain. But absolutely no one held up theirs. Every single exchange was late, changed, missing, and/or carried unexpected charges. Not a single entity in the entire chain delivered what was advertised or agreed upon.
So what are your experiences? Does it seem broken to you? According to my fellow travelers, what I experienced is nothing out of the ordinary. They seem to take a perverse pride in how much they endure to spend a week somewhere. For me, I’ve already cleared “self-managed” travel with the manager, and will use my RV (for reimbursement) on all the but the longest trips.
I don’t travel much, but when I have I’ve maybe had one glitch or hang up during the trip. e.g. flight delay. I find it hard to believe you basically had every single possible thing go wrong on one trip.
The most recent time I travelled (trip to Vegas this August), the only foul-ups that happened were a changed gate on my return flight, and a seatback that broke during boarding and had to be repaired, causing about a 60-minute delay.
Frankly, a lot of your beefs seem to be with your fellow tourists (people getting in your space, the Wifi running slow due to heavy usage, people setting off the fire alarm, etc.) than with the industry.
I do think long-distance travel in the US is unreliable and sometimes frustrating, for 2 reasons:
[ul]
[li]There is no high-speed rail, which would be inherently more reliable than airlines. (Average delay on the Japanese bullet train is 40 seconds.)[/li][li]American travelers are extremely price-conscious. This forces airlines to do everything they can to lower fares: tight schedule, every flight filled to near capacity, very little redundancy to deal with problems (e.g. no spare aircraft available in case of weather delays or mechanical problems). Though I don’t think this is unique to the US. [/li][/ul]
As for American hotels. I don’t recall ever experiencing any of the problems you mention. I’ve stayed at extended-stay hotels that only clean the room 4 times a week, but that was clearly explained.
I can fly a whole month without doing a gate/plane change on departure or having a terminal change on arrival. Other months it seems like it happens once a week or occasionally more.
I sleep in hotels 10-15 nights a month. It’s been a year or more since the last time my room wasn’t ready on time or the coffee maker was broken.
In 25 years I’ve been in 1 (minor) hotel fire and 2 fire drills. I did have one really memorable lousy night where some film company was filming a movie about street racing right outside our hotel. From about midnight to 0600 on Sunday. Lots of screeching tires & ricer racers wailing up and down the streets. Uggh. And I’ve had a bunch of uncomfortable nights over the years with lousy heat or air conditioning.
You’re right that hotel WiFi is generally pretty slow. They want to provide enough bandwidth for email downloading for a few people, not live streaming porn for every room.
I don’t rent cars that often, maybe 5 times a year. Even using the cheapo 3rd party sites to make reservations I’ve not had any glitches.
My point being that yes, every one of the things you described really do happen. But not that often.
Look at the bright side: since everything went wrong on your trip, you’re waay ahead of the curve. Your next 10 trips ought to be flawless.
I have had all of these things happen to me, with the exception of #2, and #8 as I don’t drink coffee and, even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t make a cup in my room.
#9 has happened to me once only, thank goodness.
#1 happens to me much more frequently than makes sense, and its increased prevalence these days is bloody ridiculous. It just happened to me again last week for a flight from PHL to DFW. We had to disembark the plane after it was in the queue for departure because of an unidentified smell, which turned out to be the fumes from the plane in front of us. Too late, we were off the plane. It took 2 hours to get us back on the plane and ready for take-off, making many of us late for connecting flights and meetings, and this was only after having to walk to a different gate a billion miles away in a different terminal to board again.
#6, yeah, I don’t even get upset about this anymore. It is what it is. I just consider myself lucky whenever it is thrown in for free. Email is pretty much all I use it for anyway, and Netflix if the buffering is not too bad.
It is funny though, I can’t remember the last time I turned on the TV in a hotel room. It has to be almost two years at this point.
I know it sounds like a yarn, but these really did happen.
But it looks like it was statistical anomaly. This is good news, as I was hoping it wasn’t always this bad. According to most of the replies, I just drew the short straw on this one.
I guess that’s part of it. I take significant pains to minimize my impact and intrusion on my fellow travelers, and I get annoyed when it isn’t reciprocated. I try to be cognizant not only of personal space, but staying within the what’s “allotted” to me by the airplane seat. To the extent possible, I don’t encroach on those beside me, and I usually check with the person behind me before reclining (and I keep that at a minimum). A friendly hello and “I’m gonna lean back just a little, let me know if it crowds you and I’ll move up some” goes a long way towards making the trip palatable for everyone. Finding myself squeezed on all sides and a seatback unceremoniously shoved into my face irritates me.
I’ll freely admit that part of my grumpiness comes from doing without my CPAP on the trip. I’ve learned from experience what happens to expensive stuff in my checked bag. In my defense, in *none *of these events was I rude to anyone. I saved it and vented here.
Hopefully LSLGuy is right and I’m due for smooth sailing for awhile. Thanks to everyone for your replies.
So don’t do without it, and don’t check it. Walk it on. It’s medical equipment and the carry-on limit doesn’t apply to it and airlines can’t charge you to carry it on. In my experience TSA knows what it is (they just make you take it out of the carrier like a laptop), the airline knows what it is and they’ll accommodate it on the plane. It is a pain to lug one more thing on the aircraft, but CPAPs generally aren’t all that big or heavy and they come with decent cases for exactly this purpose – travel – and they stow easily in the overheads or wherever. I’ve done this multiple times and it’s really no big deal.
Not going to hold my breath for high-speed rail except for maybe some regional projects. I will say this - if there was an airline that had fewer seats in the cabin, figured out how to eliminate the middle seat, and had legroom enough for a 6’1" man to be reasonably comfortable on a 3-4 hour flight, I’d gladly pay an extra $100-200 per round trip over what we have available now. I really don’t care so much if they provide food or drinks for free, I just hate getting crammed into a tube with no personal space for 3+ hours.
I consider insanely loud and piercing to be something right. Only moderately loud and my fire alarm is likely waking up in an oven if there’s a real fire. That assumes that the system was working properly and was going off because of some boneheaded client. That it just happened to get tacked on top of the perfect storm of bad trips… I’d probably be laughing in the parking lot wondering out loud when the rain was going to start. I appreciate dark humor though.
That’s still the hotel’s fault. If they don’t provide enough wi-fi to accommodate their clients’ usage rates, that’s not the clients’ fault, it’s the hotel’s.
In effect we rent square feet of floor space by the hour. You want about double the floor space. So for that to work out even you’d need to be willing to pay roughly double the fare. Are you?
Sadly, not enough people are willing to do that. In fact many will gladly get on airplanes with even less legroom than the majors just to save $20. Unfortunately, the most aggressive bargain hunter KMart shoppers are crowding out most of any other possibility in the product space.
Believe me when I say most everybody in the industry would love to find a way to break the cycle of competing solely on price and the ability to ever-cheapen what used to be (40-ish years ago) a premium product for a premium customer base.
Yep. the term “Jet Set” used to mean that you were well-off enough to travel by air. Now that (theoretically) everyone can, that means airlines have to compete on price. Which means they have to do what they can to make money. You want affordable plane fare, then don’t bitch about the cattle-car accommodations. You want nice accommodations on an airplane, don’t bitch about how much tickets cost. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. One airplane costs the airline about $100m-$200m to purchase. they burn tons of fuel, and the price of fuel isn’t always predictable.
But, Gulf and Far Eastern (and now Turkish Air) airlines seem to be able to still provide a comfortable experience and have reasonable prices. It seems a bit of abetter regulatory regime, ( not less than x amount of legroom on flights longer than a certain length, and free meals or snacks for ones longer than say 3)
Some trips nothing will go wrong, some trips one thing will go wrong. A few trips it’ll all go wrong. A few months ago my fiancee attempted a simple trip to Lexington that went so badly she never even got there but DID get to go to Chicago despite the fact that city was not actually on her itinerary.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts the airline in this case is American - and through DFW. In the 9-10 months I’ve (unusually) flown 3 round trips on American - 6 segments, all with connections at DFW. In this 6 segments, they changed my gate…6 times. This is twice as many gate changes as all the other flights I’ve taken in the past six years combined.
Not sure what American’s issue is (or home much DFW plays a part) - maybe they just need better scheduling software.