When I was much younger I thought that the idea of traveling the world seemed really glamorous. Now that I travel a lot those illusions have been shattered.
I fly Delta when possible in order to accumulate frequent-flyer miles faster. I use a Delta American Express Card to buy tickets in order to gain 1 free checked bag per person in my party. I am a loyal customer, but I am starting to think there’s no advantage to doing things that way. On the recent trip from HNL to LAX we were crammed into a Boeing 757-300, one of my least favorite commercial planes. In case you don’t fly much, it is a long, narrow-bodied plane with 3 crammed seats on each side of a ridiculously narrow aisle. There are 200 passenger seats in coach, and two available restrooms. I’m not a math genius, but that looks like 100/1 ratio. On a 5 hour plus flight, assuming each person has to use the restroom at least once… some more than once, that tiny aisle is often jammed with people clustered near the restrooms waiting their turn. If you are one of the unfortunate people seated in rows 39 or 40, you spend the majority of your flight with the rear-ends of your fellow passengers near your face, since there is no other place for them to stand.
Delta has joined the ranks of other struggling air carriers, and no longer provides hot meals on those flights. They will sell you a high-calorie snack pack for $5 if you are desperate for food… and I use that term in its loosest connotation. I am making at least two more trips this year, and the accumulation of loyalty miles looks less and less like an incentive; I will be carefully checking the airline schedules for carriers flying Airbus or other planes with more leg room, wider aisles, power-ports at coach seats, and modern entertainment options. As always, I will use seatguru.com to try to find the least objectionable seats possible. I will kind of miss Delta… but not much.