Air travel can be a humiliating, dehumanizing and even torturous experience — at least according to my e-mail inbox.
Tag: ECONOMY CLASS
Maybe first class passengers aren’t so special after all
One piece of conventional wisdom has gone unchallenged during our ongoing debate about class, privilege and human dignity in air travel: that the elites sitting in the big seats are subsidizing everyone else’s low fares.
Maybe it’s time to challenge that conventional wisdom.
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Let’s kill economy class
One of the most troubling travel stories of 2014 was a report that airlines are considering a new class of service — and I use the term “class” loosely — called economy “minus.”
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Delta Economy “Comfort” fell short — can we get a refund?
Rod and Carol Mourant recently flew from Seattle to Miami on Delta Air Lines, and they didn’t like it. Amid their list of complaints is one that stuck, and made me wonder if maybe they had a case.
They played by the rules, and lost. Now they want my help in righting a wrong.
“There were several events that made the trip less than enjoyable,” says Rod Mourant. “From our perspective, the most irritating were Delta’s attitude and their baggage policy. Through actual experience, we found out that Delta’s carry-on and checked baggage policies are a joke.”
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Downgraded on Air France, but where’s their refund?
Lisa and Wayne Roccaforte felt lucky to have premium economy class seats on their recent Air France flight from Paris to Houston.
With good reason: The seats have 38 inches of “pitch” and are 19 inches wide, a sharp contrast to the medieval 32 inches of legroom and 17 inches of seat space in economy class. (Seriously, folks, that should be illegal.)
But try as hard as they might, the Roccafortes couldn’t avoid Torture Class on their transatlantic flight.
“We arrived at Charles de Gaulle three hours before our flight to check in and were told that the flight was very full,” remembers Lisa Roccaforte. “The woman that checked us in told us we may be moved to business class.”
Read more “Downgraded on Air France, but where’s their refund?”