Memo to Air Tran and the airport authorities of Atlanta and Philadelphia

Oh, crap. And the OP got eaten, yet. Here’s the original text:

From: the whimpering wreck in seat 10E

Air Tran: what in the Christly Fuck was the meaning of that circus in Hobby Airport this morning? There was about as much order at the check-in desk as there was at Ton Son Nhut during the fall of Saigon. Firstly, I am completely clueless as to how it can take four agents two and a half hours to issue boarding passes to a mere 112 people. Secondly, has a departure from Hobby ever, in the whole sorry history of your ludicrous excuse for an airline, EVER gotten away from the gate less than an hour late?

OK, so we were 15 minutes down because of your abject failure to process the passengers in time, and another 20 because of the unaccompanied minor that you put off the plane. But why did we then sit baking in the sun another 45 minutes? Why, in six flights out of Hobby in the past six months, have I left more than an hour late every single freakin’ time?

And finally, why can your Atlanta departure screens and live personnel never seem to agree on the correct gate to catch my connecting flight? Since you are always always ALWAYS late, time is of the essence, and directing me to a Minneapolis-bound flight when I actually want to go to Philly just seems perverse to me.

Atlanta airport authority: about terminal C, fellas, do ya think you could put some actual food service in the damn place? Since the majority of ‘C’ is taken up by Air Tran, who serve nothing but a bag of miniature pretzels (net wt. 0.5 oz.) and a half cup of soda on their flights, and who, due to their chronic lateness, routinely force passengers to go most of a day without food or drink, it would be very nice indeed if we had a choice other than:

a) Popeye’s: disgusting, warmed-over fried chicken and your choice of mushy biscuits or day-old fries, or

b) Charley’s Steakery: disgusting, unseasoned fried meat served without condiments on mushy buns, with day-old fries.

If you can’t get round to opening up the terminal to other, more appetizing concessions, could you at least provide a bit more seating in the ones you do have? Providing seats for 40 when you have literally hundreds of hungry self-loading cargo milling about shows real consideration, let me tell you. Guess you want to keep them out in the waiting areas where you can bombard them with CNN Headline News till they beg for merciful death.

Philly airport authority: What sort of utter dolts spend tens of millions of dollars building a spiffy new Terminal F, but neglect to make a provision for hotel and car park shuttle buses to pick up returning passengers? Peons such as I, who don’t have the luxury of personal drivers to pick us up, have to schlep our own fifty pounds of bags a half mile to the pickup curb at Terminal D/E.

Signs at the ‘F’ carousels blithely promise free luggage carts (on the second floor of course, not down here where we need them), but are there any? Are there fuck. You see, the carts are ‘Smarte Carts’, for the use of which the concessionaire charges $3.00 each elsewhere in the airport. So, of course, they have a REAL incentive to push a few down to ‘F’ for the damn whining freeloaders there, don’t they?

Please address these concerns immediately.

Yeah, right.

I’d just like to say that your sig line is wonderfully appropriate.

Fuck you, U. S. Airways. How the fuck can you misplace EVERYONE’S luggage on a particular flight? How is it possible that you don’t have any sort of a fucking clue where my bag is? Given that everyone who connected from Richmond through Philly did not have their baggage join them in Hartford, did it occur to any of you pea-brained useless sacks of shit to, I don’t know, look around for a pile of luggage in Philly with tags on all the bags saying they should go to Hartford? This, of course, assumes that the bags were on the goddamned flight from Richmond, which you haven’t been able to confirm either because you have no system in place for tracking baggage once it’s been scanned at the ticket counter. Instead, you rely on your highly skilled and trained baggage handlers to get this job done. Now, most of the time, they get it done right. But by this point in time, SOMEONE in Philly, and in Richmond, and anywhere else they have a pile of unclaimed luggage, should be looking for these goddamned bags. Fuck you.

Ah, AirTran. I don’t think any flight of theirs from any city has gotten off the ground anywhere approaching on time. It took them something like 18 hours for them to get my sweetie from Ft. Lauderdale to NYC in January. That was one long friggin’ day.

Then I had a flight with them from FLL to DC, and when I went to check in, the board at the gate had the info for an earlier flight on it, and the surly gate agents were getting annoyed that people kept coming up and asking them which flight it was. Well, gee, maybe if you got the right info up there, that might cut down on the questions. I got bumped off that flight because it was overbooked. Now I have a voucher for a free roundtrip flight, but I’m reluctant to use it because that would mean having to fly AirTran again.

Folks, if JetBlue flies to your city, use them.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Northwest.

I’ve flown AirTran at least 10 times, and have never had any trouble with them at all. They are my first choice for ticketing after I get through the swamp of Expedia/travelocity/cheaptickets/hotwire/orbitz/priceline.

Knowing that I can fly pretty much anywhere on the east coast for about $150 roundtrip is pretty cool.