Hate air travel? Join the club.
By far, the one part of snowboarding that I never miss is air travel. It’s the necessary evil needed to visit most ski resorts. So, I present to you, the top 4 things that should be changed about air travel.
1) Security is getting ridiculous
I’m looking at you USA. Why do I need to get retinal scanned? That seems excessive. Also, why do you hire crappy, underpaid people to do the body scanning. The body scanning is already excessive, but is it any wonder that you have incidents of TSA people getting caught stealing laptops and people saving the body scan photos that are meant to be getting deleted.
Hire professionals if you want professional conduct. Hire crappy paid, poorly trained staff if you want further problems with security personnel misbehaving. Some TSA agents are professional, but others aren’t. It shouldn’t be a hit or miss scenario when these people are in charge of air travel security.
2) Fix the stupid reclining seat problem
Either make all the seats permanently reclined or unable to recline fully, but fixed in a semi-reclined position. The current way that most airlines do it is stupid. You have people who are 6 foot+ getting their knees crushed by kids who don’t need to be reclined.
Make it fixed so that you don’t have problems with one person reclining and forcing everyone else behind them to recline in order to get their space back.
3) Stop waking me up to sell duty free junk
It’s hard enough to sleep in your cramped economy class seats without you waking people up by shouting “Duty free goods anyone?” when people are trying to sleep. If you must do it, do it just after a meal service, before people are sleeping.
Shouldn’t this be common sense?
4) Airline customer service are often clueless
With the exception of Singapore Airlines, whose staff have been great nearly every time, most other airline staff don’t seem to understand that your crappy service just adds to people hating you more. This results in you getting less business, which leads to you getting paid less, which leads to you giving crappy customer service out of frustration.
It’s a vicious cycle. I understand that airlines are having financial problems right now, but you’re not doing yourself any favours by providing crappy customer service.
Here’s an idea: Most people at airports are already annoyed and slightly frustrated because of how overcomplicated and annoying air travel has become. How about taking that as a chance to be that one non-suck moment in a passengers trip. That sounds like good marketing to me.
In addition, good customer service shouldn’t be reserved for business class travellers. I understand that they should get perks and more attention due to their higher fare, but that doesn’t mean you should cut out economy class passengers from receiving any semblance of good customer service.
Who do you think is going to be more grateful for good customer service? The guy in business class who gets pampered regularly or the economy class guy who’s been awake for 24 hours next to the crying baby?