Flying is great, right? It’s a means of fast transportation, and for most of us it’s fun. But have you ever thought about some of the ways that airlines are really screwing you over?

Take window seats for example. Airlines are charging you extra to sit by a window seat. How much extra? Just ask Eileen Flemming, associate editor of The Seattle Times, who says when she requested a window seat on a United Airlines flight, the agent told her it would be $41 because a window seat is an upgrade.

We would assume that you pay extra for the view, but that’s not the airline’s reasons. Airlines are charging extra because it’s their way of compensating to keep the cost of the economy seats lower. So, the airlines say it’s an upgrade, but it seems to me there are way more down sides than up when sitting by a window. There’s less leg room, you have to crawl over someone to use the bathroom, and if there’s ever an emergency, you’re stuck on the inside. Who wants to pay extra for that?

Now they’re charging you for food too. I can understand charging for food, it was a nice luxury when we use to get it for free but those days are over. What I don’t appreciate are the ridiculous prices they’re charging to eat on a plane.

Trip Planner has an article on the price of food on planes. For a breakfast, you can get a muffin, granola, coffee, fruit, and water for $7, that’s not too bad. It’s all the other meals that kill. For lunch, you can pay $7 for a sandwich and $5 for a cup of soup. Now, that’s a little pricey! But wait, there’s more. If you’re flying out of the Los Angeles airport, you can buy a ready-to-go gourmet meal specifically for your flight for the whopping price of $30. Now, I don’t care how gourmet it is, there’s no way that an airport could possibly make something that is actually worth $30.

You’ll find airlines raising the price for baggage too. This summer they’re implementing a new system where you can only check in one baggage item, and any extra bag will be an additional $25. It’s hard enough to be under the weight limit of 50lb., let alone be limited to one bag, especially when you’re going somewhere for an extended period of time. It all goes back to them trying to save money on gas, but when someone’s saving, someone’s losing, and that’s us.

Speaking of saving money on gas, here’s something that really gets me. Pilots are now slowing down to save on fuel, but that doesn’t seem to be helping the price of flights any. They keep going up while our flight times get longer.

I read a forum where pilots were having this discussion, and they were all agreeing among themselves that slowing down was only adding a few minutes to their time and they were still making the schedule. Here’s the thing, I don’t fly nearly as much as some people, but I’ve experienced a number of delayed flights out of the many that I’ve flown. So, I don’t want to hear pilots say that they can fly slower and still make it on time because plain and simple, they aren’t.

I’m sure many of you have heard about that big news story a while ago that talked about American Airlines making a flight with only 5 passengers and how environmentalists jumped all over them for that. So now these airlines are taking those handful of people and putting them on a different plane.

For the airlines, the passengers, and the environmentalists, everything seems good. There’s just one other group of people that we’re forgetting here. It’s the other passengers who are waiting at the arrival airport for the plane that just got cancelled, and all the other airports that the cancelled plane is suppose to fly to that day. I don’t care how much I love the environment, I’d want my flight.

One other issue that I think tops them all is a matter of safety. Airlines are now spending less money on maintenance and new planes. Now isn’t that comforting? Airlines such as United and American have planes averaging around 18 years old. Then there’s Northwest which tops them all with models that date back 36 years. No wonder so many flights full of people get stuck on the ground for a couple of hours while maintenance guys try to do a quick patch-up which inevitably delays everyone else’s flights.

With all this information, is this going to decrease the amount of flying you do? Maybe domestically, but I doubt taking a boat would be an option for you if you’re going overseas. This just helps you to see how airlines are taking advantage of you, and what you need to look for in an airline the next time you’re going to fly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Travel Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.