Airport travel stinks and I hate flying with you

‘Your flight will board in 1 minute, please wait until your group is called’.?

That seems to translate ‘please rush the gate and let’s all try to board in no apparent order’. One of my friends in the UK asked me a few years ago “why are Americans so bad at queuing?“. I never played Rugby but I know a Scrum when I see one.

On most airlines you know you will have a seat and there is no apparent need to board first. The only discernible reason to be aboard early is for bag space, which I can understand, but half the people I see boarding are doing so with 1 small carry-on.

Now I am fascinated by human behavior and the manipulation of human behavior is evident to me the moment I clear the security process. In almost every airport you can immediately see tarmac and wings and tails…they consider that comforting and it serves as ‘wayfinding’ allowing people to orient themselves.

They always use a limited number of sans serif fonts to make the signs easier to read at distance.

They surround you with natural light, which is why store and restaurant entrances are always facing the gate and outside windows. They do not want you to feel additional stress from not knowing if your flight is boarding (which it isn't, no matter how many times you check).

They know the majority of modern travelers prefer to have NO HUMAN INTERACTION. It seems we prefer a kiosk to any threat of interacting with a stranger. When we don’t have to talk to a stranger we will spend 10% more and are likely to be in a ‘self-indulgent’ mood 60 minutes before a flight. We are happier when we don’t have to talk to anyone…so I hope you like robots serving you coffee, they are working on it.

They know Americans are all about ‘fair’ so a single long line that everyone has to go through is always considered less stressful for people. I am not one of these people.

But all of their fancy airport design efforts are thwarted by the one person standing on the moving walkway. Really?! It is a ‘walkway’, not a ‘stand there’.?

As I researched this piece (don’t worry, I didn’t do that much, I felt qualified after more than 30 years of 200,000+ miles a year) I realized any research, and all my experience were worth nothing. I am pre-covid. Post-covid the world is observably different and aircraft boarding is ground zero.

I once routinely observed multiple gentlemen offering to stow the luggage for any female within a reasonable distance. How long ago that seems now. Recently, I have seen grown men push little old ladies out of the way, take their seat, and not look up.

I know that airlines have turned boarding into a business - and I can’t blame them. We simply will not pay any kind of a premium for a ticket. But we will pay, and apparently pay a great deal, to board the plane early in the process. So that line you are standing in on the jet bridge? You paid extra for that. Did you get the credit card with boarding privileges and that sneaky extra interest charge? That extra fee you paid gets you to whatever city you are traveling at exactly the same time as everyone else.

The airlines started to charge extra to check bags in 2008 and so everyone carried on. To carry on you want to board early, to board early you pay. The whole system is a game in manipulating human behavior now. We wouldn't pay more so they squeeze more seats onto the plane and completely ignore the increasing size of the passengers that grew in complete and inverse proportion during that time.

The incentives are all wrong. I will not wax eloquent for missing the commercial travel of my youth where people got dressed up to fly and did crazy things like enjoy the experience and were nice to each other.

The race is on. See you at the gate.

*only san serif fonts were used in the article

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