I just got back from Europe. It took me 30 hours to get from Pittsburgh to Prague, and 21 hours to get from Paris back to Pittsburgh.
I had four cancelled flights, lost baggage, several delayed flights (basically all of them), and spent several hours in the cattle-calls that pass for line-ups to get on the various flights. In fairness, on the last leg of the trip our bags got to the baggage claim carousel before we did. Nice job, for once.
While I understand that the total number of people who are flying is down, the airlines seem to be clustering all the passengers into a relatively few gates, so that you are always in a crowd of people and almost always on a full plane. Seats, of course, keep getting incrementally smaller and smaller; fortunately I'm not abnormally tall.
On a positive note, the in-flight entertainment was reasonably good. I watched several movies on the flights across the pond. And the food was tolerable under the circumstances.
I've never really understood why they don't board the back of the plane first and the front last. Boarding could be done in a fraction of the time without waiting for the passengers in front of you to load their bags into the overhead.
They have taken something that used to be enjoyable and turned into misery.
It will take me a year to forget this experience sufficiently to even consider another trip overseas.
I had four cancelled flights, lost baggage, several delayed flights (basically all of them), and spent several hours in the cattle-calls that pass for line-ups to get on the various flights. In fairness, on the last leg of the trip our bags got to the baggage claim carousel before we did. Nice job, for once.
While I understand that the total number of people who are flying is down, the airlines seem to be clustering all the passengers into a relatively few gates, so that you are always in a crowd of people and almost always on a full plane. Seats, of course, keep getting incrementally smaller and smaller; fortunately I'm not abnormally tall.
On a positive note, the in-flight entertainment was reasonably good. I watched several movies on the flights across the pond. And the food was tolerable under the circumstances.
I've never really understood why they don't board the back of the plane first and the front last. Boarding could be done in a fraction of the time without waiting for the passengers in front of you to load their bags into the overhead.
They have taken something that used to be enjoyable and turned into misery.
It will take me a year to forget this experience sufficiently to even consider another trip overseas.
