You Should Know

Airlines are assholes and they keep getting worse. We’re at the end of the stage of capitalism where things seem somewhat ok sometimes and maybe good if you’re lucky. Everything is going to be awful and terrible to increasing degrees from here on.

I stopped flying United when they beat the shit out of one of their passengers and dragged him off the plane

Obligatory "fuck United".

They fucked up my vacation a number of years ago and I have since sworn them off. The most generous interpretation of the incident is that I missed an email updating a time change and arrived at the airport after the flight had left. Their next flight wasn't until the next morning. My wife and I were looking and there was a flight from a different airline that would have cost them $400 each to book for us (they wouldn't refund us so we could purchase that separately). The first agent at the counter completely understood our request but simply didn't have the authority to make that decision. So she got a supervisor. The supervisor did that annoying ass thing where they listen to your request and then restate it in objectively different terms to sound unreasonable. In the end they covered a hotel for the night and gave us $550 each in travel vouchers and lost a customer for life. So they ended up paying way more and lost a customer than had they not fucked around from the start. Had they paid the $400 from the beginning, we'd have given them much higher preference on our future flights which have been many.

I used to fly united quite a bit and it used to be pretty good. But these days my options for flying for work are united, delta, and southwest and I usually choose delta because they don't charge you for shit and you can have both an overhead carry on and a small bag plus free internet on the plane. In the end they're all shit, but I'm going to pick the lesser of the shits each time. Same reason I have Comcast internet.

I refuse to fly domestically anymore just because the TSA is all security theater, I refuse to go through their backscatter x-ray, and I'm not interested in their enhanced groping. I will ride my motorcycle 1000 miles in a single day rather than take a plane anywhere.

Basic economy simply isn't worth it. They nickel and dime you with all the BS fees. And the credit card thing is total bullshit, too. They do it because they want to make sure they have your card on file in order to sell you overpriced snack boxes and charge them to your seat.

Once I had to buy a poor lady some crackers because she was on the last leg of a flight from Asia and hasn't eaten anything, but the stewardess couldn't take her money unless she had set up her CC ahead of time.

I fly United often enough for work that I have some status, so I'm one of the entitied snobs who board first and hog all the overhead space.

Yeah they've gotten really weird about forcing you to use their app and put a credit card on it constantly. Really annoying.

That’s some budget airline behavior. If they want to do tha, they should price their flights accordingly.

I learned this about United this summer. Except the language they used didn't specifically rule out roller bags, it called them "full-sized carryon". I showed up with a checked bag and a small carryon. The desk agent told me wheels make it a "full-sized" regardless of the dimensions. Fortunately, I was able to stuff a bunch of stuff a bunch of my crap into my checked SCUBA bag, and repack my regs and underwear into the backpack I was bringing anyways.

Note: This was on an International flight so I REALLY didn't appreciate feeling like I was flying on a budget airline.

After having to fly United a bunch of times this summer, they changed the names of the tickets and invented a new "no one wants that" tier.

There's now standard economy which is what everyone's used to and gives you a "personal item" (i.e. a backpack or a purse) and a "carry on item", and basic economy which only includes the personal item. They mention it on their website, but on third party websites its not quite as obvious which ticket you're getting.

It has been a nightmare - on every single flight there's a crowd of people pissed that they aren't allowed a carry on with their ticket, with them having to run halfway across the airport to upgrade their tickets or pay 3x as much for a bag they thought was included.

If you're being charitable, it's a roundabout discount on checked bags to fix the problem they invented by charging for checked bags and then sucking at handling them. Every single flight I took had them asking for people to check their carry on for free because the bins were going to be overloaded, and it seems like they want to incentivize actually checking a bag again.

I started instantly asking them to gate check my carry on (for free) because honestly, the airport experience is way nicer when you don't have to deal with your luggage all the time. If you check 1 bag as a couple you might even save money, and if you're alone it might be worth the difference to not have to worry about only having two pairs of pants on your three week trip.

More realistically they want to normalize having to pay for carry on the same way they did checked bags, and they are trying to sneak around that by starting with only their new BS economy tier. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of "basic" and just made carry on a "business class" or whatever amenity.

Well, they do break guitars...

Its a good thing this hold over from immediately after the attacks on 9/11 happened is still in effect or the terrorist might have won.

Not to hijack the thread but which airlines is least likely to put you on a plane made by boeing?

I wish flying was affordable. My girlfriend lives in Korea and it's going to cost her 2k to come see my family in Canada in December. This is nearly double what she paid in 2017 for the same trip, and while it's not prohibitively expensive, it's deterrently expensive

I read that as "United States" and the headline only started to look suspicious with the word "passengers".

You know what's objectively worst than united, as per polls and feedback?

Every Canadian airline.

We used to have a good one, but they just got bought out by scumbags. It wasn't the one with our country in the name. Now they both suck worse than the other. You don't think that's possible, logically, but you'll find out it's true.