Well I'm back from my vacation and I've been debating for about 2 days now about weather I should tell you how it was or not. You see, I'm the kind of person that won't tell you about something cool just so it will stay unpopular. Not that where I was wasn't popular, but it was pretty much unspoiled and to be honest, I'd really like to keep it that way. On the other hand, I went to the greatest summer vacation spot ever over the past 4 or 5 days and I want to tell the world about it like it was a new love.. which, I guess, it is.
For now, I'll just state the obvious (since I think I already told you this part) and announce that I was in Maine. I guess I don't have to actually tell you where in Maine I was. I can say that the temperature was perfect, the number of tourists was relatively low, the nature was phenominal and the ocean was incredible. In short, it was perfect for me. I will probably move there sometime in the next couple of years and that's why I don't want anyone to know where I was, I want it to stay the way it is.
I will say this though, air travel in america is simply pathetic. The trip is about 600 miles and some people we were with had driven up and it took them 10 hours. Our trip there, from door to door took us 12.5 hours. My trip back took me 10.25. Why? Well, delayed flights kept me on the ground in philly for 1.5 hours, boston for over 8 hours and maine for about 4 hours.
I'm not going to go into detail, but let me just say that US Air could have done a much better job since all of the delays made no sense. First off, it seems to me that nobody flys in the rain or in fog or at night anymore, which is odd since todays planes can handle almost anything in terms of weather and it's actually safer to fly at night but start paying attention to your flights and you will see that even a slight rainstorm anywhere near your destination will wreak total havok on air travel for that day (no matter where you are headed).
The Airlines seem to not really care about customer service anymore. I mean, you know that they stopped serving snacks and food and have also stopped even giving out the tiny bags of pretzels now.. soon they will discontinue beverage service entirely. They just don't care about passengers anymore. When I was in maine, I arrived at 11 am for a 12:30 flight and the place was packed even though the plane only held 25 people... do you know why? There was only one plane running this route so since there was a little bit of fog in the morning, the 6am flight was delayed 2 hours, which in turn delayed the 9am flight 2.5 hours and of course the 12:30 flight didn't leave until 3:30.
My question is this.. how hard would it be to fly a nice sized jet out there and pick up the whole lot of us so they could get back on schedule and make a bunch of people happy? I know about flying and this runway was well over 5k feet.. there were all kinds of G4's there so I know a 737 would have no trouble landing.
Why dind't they do it? I'll tell you why. The airlines don't need to care about passengers since the government continually bails them out! In an open market with no government intervention, the airlines would try to make customers happy since (and my friends who drove provide a great example here) if people stopped flying with them (or stopped flying certain routes.. say maine to boston) they would go out of business. It's simple.
Also, on some short hops like the one from maine to boston, smaller airlines would crop up if they knew they could compete on an even playing field. Right now, US air and the other majors make compitition simply impossible since they can just slash their prices to compete since they really don't have a bottom line with the govt. helping them out.
Sad sad sad..
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