American Airlines downgrades Thomas Sennett and his family to economy class on their flights from Boston to Phoenix. Why isn’t it refunding the fare difference?
They’re spoiled. They’re demanding. And they’re ruining travel for everyone else.
Don’t take my word for it. That’s what employees say about these guests, who they derisively call “silver spoon” travelers.
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.
It’s a six-hour flight from Honolulu to Phoenix, so when a US Airways agent offered Blair Fell an upgrade to first class for just $350, he jumped at the opportunity.
“The agent convinced me by saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like to lie back and sleep?” he remembers.
In the customer service world, a first-class, roundtrip ticket anywhere the airline flies is the ultimate mea culpa — an airline’s way of saying, “We’re really sorry.”
Should an airline’s first class section be adults-only? Ask passengers like James Armstrong, and you’ll hear a compelling reason for keeping babies in the back — if not off the plane entirely.
So they’re getting rid of first class, are they? At least that’s what our friends in the traditional media are reporting.
I remember writing a similar story — in 1999.
Forgetting, for the moment, that the new article fails to draw a clear distinction between domestic and international first class, let me be the first to say that if premium seats disappeared, I’d be popping Champagne at the Elliott ranch.
