I’m sat on the plane shell shocked from our recent airport experience, we are: Traveling by air. “Statistically speaking, still the safest way to travel” but hell, the most exhausting and irritating.
Am I delusional and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses but wasn’t travelling by air so much simpler and easier back in the day? Granted it will never be as easy and stress free as it used to be before those loonies flew passenger jets into buildings in New York, but it gets steadily worse and worse with every trip I make.
I do remember travelling before 9/11, that’s how old I am, how good was it being dropped off right outside the doors to the terminal, unloading your bags and waving goodbye to the person you had roped in for the task of driving you in, sometimes, they’d park up and come in with you!! No chance of that now with the £6 per second parking charge…. I do have a vague recollection of my grandparents coming pretty much right up to the gate!
Anyway… Check in time! you’d take your cases along with passports and your tickets and hand them to some lady who applies foundation with a plastering trowel. She would then weigh your cases, slap a tag on, ask you where you wanted to sit and give you your boarding passes, which had the gate number written on it, none of this waiting for the screen to tell you!
Everything about the above is just so much better than now. First of all… boarding passes on your phone. You all know TimberMane’s stance on us being slaves to these little glowing rectangles. They’ll tell you it’s to “make things quicker” and “streamline your journey” but let’s be honest, that’s marketing waffle. I’m not buying it.
Granted you can print it at home but nobody ever does, instead you hand your phone to the Max Factor counter, where they scroll through the screen shots of your boarding passes because lets face it, it’s easier to put them in your picture album rather than hunt through the pesky app for them! And when they say “swipe to the next one,” that’s a clear sign they’ve ABSOLUTELY swiped too far before and seen something they didn’t want to. Make of that what you will……
Then there’s the great seat allocation scam, as mentioned your seats were either allocated at booking or at check-in, the system would see that you were family and put you together… sensible right!?
Funny Story: We once went on holiday and ended up sitting with strangers, nothing out the ordinary these days but back then it raised a few eyebrows… Turned out we had the same surname. What are the chances!?
Anyway… nowadays you have to pay to be with your family or friends… Money spinning SCAM in this grumpy blokes opinion… I did suggest to my wife on this trip that we don’t pay for the seat allocation and let some-one else take care of our two year old daughter for four hours… she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as I was for some reason.
So… we’re back in the 90’s suitcases dropped off and up to security, carry on bags through the X-Ray scanner as you walk through the metal detectors with your shoes on then through to the waiting lounge where you’d have 10 hours to kill because bag drop off and security was a breeze….
Now? Now it’s a queue that starts at one end of the terminal and finishes at the other. When you finally get to the “state-of-the-art scanners,” you still have to take every little thing out. You know the scene: Phil in front of me unloads half of PC World (Remember them?) Tablet, Laptop, Kindle, Two phones. Wallet. Keys. Liquids in the magic little plastic bag that, if we’re honest, probably couldn’t hold the 100 ml if it leaked, let alone anything more sinister.
Then Phil has to take off his shoes. Thank you, Mr. Shoe Bomber. But Phil hasn’t come prepared in easy slip-ons, nope! He’s got his high-top boots on, tied in a double knot like he’s off hiking. Thing is, we all know this part is coming. We’ve danced this dance a thousand times, yet somehow, Phil and everyone else is never ready, put it all in one pocket and have it ready for pity’s sake!!
Eventually you make it through security with your dignity in tact (hopefully), what’s next? Ahh yes the lounge, or it used to be! Now it’s not a lounge at all, it’s a full blown shopping centre! A labyrinth of booze, perfume, tobacco and jewellery. Here begins the brief handover from the airline trying to fleece you of every penny to the airport having a proper go at it themselves.
If you’re skilled enough to keep you’re eyes down, dodge the duty free bandits and battle through the maze like you’re George MacKay in 1917 and reach the other side, you reach the so-called lounge area only now its surrounded by shops selling stuff that have absolutely no business being bought in an airport!
Luggage!? Too late mate, I’ve already sent mine off with the lady wearing half of boots.
TV’s!? Why?
“Darling, I think we need a new TV…”
“Better book a holiday then!”
Because the lounge has shrunk to make way for Victoria’s secret and JD Sports there’s nowhere to sit, except in Wetherspoons, wedged between the stag do and the old couple off to Portugal for the winter. Afterall, it is the law to have a beer before you board, even if you have to heroically skull a pint of Leffe because the info boards go from “Waiting for gate info” to “Gate 25 FINAL CALL” in the space of 10 seconds.
Problem is what used to be a relaxed pre-holiday ritual has turned into a race against time, you rage at the app before giving up and wrestle your way to the bar to pay £28 for a breakfast and a beer which arrives precisely 1 minute before that “FINAL CALL” we just spoke about…
That pint was once a moment of calm after the chaos of security, now thanks to said security it’s just another reminder of the joys of modern travel!
Finally, you’ve battled hard and made it to THE FINAL BOSS… Boarding.
The person on the loud speaker requests that all the priority passengers make their way to the gate. “Priority,” as in, paying an extra £30 quid to take off at the exact same time as the rest of the passengers who didn’t pay the £30… Did I mention we’re back to the airline ripping you off?
Then comes the call for rows 1 – 15 and 30 – 40 which for some reason everyone hears as: “can everyone charge the gate so you can queue on the jet bridge or the steps in the freezing cold because you’re all boarding in the wrong order” Phil is definitely doing this!
When you finally reach your seat, you try to stash your bag in the overhead locker… which is, of course, already full. Nobody wants to check a bag into the hold anymore. (Don’t get me started on that one.)
Gone are the day’s of happily sitting down to read the laminated safety card and pretending to care where the life jackets are. But the times they are a changin’ and things evolve, for better or for worse.
I do struggle to see how they can find more ways to squeeze money out of us… but I’ve no doubt they’ll manage.
Thing is… we’ll all do it again. We’ll queue, sprint to Wetherspoons, wrestle with boarding groups, and curse Phil’s boots. Because somewhere between the chaos and the overpriced pint, there’s still that buzz, the little thrill of going somewhere else. Modern travel might be a circus, but we keep buying the tickets because the world is a beautiful place and we deserve to experience it to the full.
Happy Travels!
TM
