Airlines. Ugh.

[Turn the Page]

I seem to recall a time when air travel was a, if not pleasant, at least tolerable experience. What happened to those days?

We booked a trip to WDW at our usual travel time of right before Labor Day. Our local airport is a little rinky dink place with a grand total of 2 arrivals a day. That's it. In the peak summer period they sometimes add a third but there aren't a lot of options. Last year we flew back on Labor Day, the day before the kids started school, and had lots of schedule chagnes and difficulties. So this year we decided to fly back on Sunday in hopes of avoiding some of the schedule changes and give ourselves a buffer before school.

That was hilarious. We have already had 2 flight time changes. Our original flight was supposed to get us in to MCO at 11 AM and now we aren't getting in until 5 PM on a short 5 day trip. Unfortunately, there are no earlier flights that day so I'm trying to get them to change us to the day before. We would still get in at 5 but at least we wouldn't lose an entire day of vacation.

Just ugh. I should just become besties with Reba McEntire and use her plane.

 

[Pooh2]

We've been doing road trips instead of flying the past 2 years to the tune of putting 15,000 miles on our car just from road tripping (5,000 miles per road trip).
We will continue with road trips our next two vacations and see if the airline industry gets back to normal by next year.
Getting in the car and driving from NH to FL right now just seems much less stressful than dealing with delays/cancellations and there's lots to see and do along the way!

 

[Allison]

Just ugh. I should just become besties with Reba McEntire and use her plane.

Odd choice considering what happened to her band and crew on a plane.

 

[starvenger]

I seem to recall a time when air travel was a, if not pleasant, at least tolerable experience. What happened to those days?

Well, the pandemic happened and airlines are still trying to figure their way back from that. And if you're at a small airport and not a hub, all these logistical shifts are going to affect you more than anywhere else.

 

[mrodgers]

Odd choice considering what happened to her band and crew on a plane.

What happened to her band and crew on an airplane?

EDIT: Oh, had to dig deep for that. 30+ years ago. I thought there was something that happened recently.

 

[Dan Murphy]

Our local airport is a little rinky dink place with a grand total of 2 arrivals a day.

Is it possible to drive, maybe an hour or so, or less, to a larger, somewhat nearby airport?

 

[Christine]

OP, I hear ya. I've actually just given up on vacation plans that involve a flight right now because the airlines aren't back to what I would consider a comfortable level. If storms or other issues occur which result in cancellations, they don't have enough flights booked to easily resolve that. I don't want to get stuck somewhere for 2 days waiting for them to get me out. I find the thought of all that very stressful so I just don't want to do it.

 

[SandyinMonterey]

We've been doing road trips instead of flying the past 2 years to the tune of putting 15,000 miles on our car just from road tripping (5,000 miles per road trip).
We will continue with road trips our next two vacations and see if the airline industry gets back to normal by next year.
Getting in the car and driving from NH to FL right now just seems much less stressful than dealing with delays/cancellations and there's lots to see and do along the way!

We've been driving too. My husband doesn't like to fly, not because he's scared, he thinks it's more of a hassle (and this was before the pandemic). We live in GA so driving to WDW/Florida isn't a big deal. We do drive from GA to NJ once a year to visit family. I hate the drive, 15 plus hours...but it is what it is. We've been wanting to visit different areas (other than WDW) llike Charleston SC, Nashville TN, Memphis and probably Universal and driving just makes it easier to do so for us.

 

[jimmymc]

The biggest answer is that flights got more competitive, i.e. cheaper. I also remember regularly having an open seat next to me and getting a meal on my 3 hour flight to Florida, but it also costed more in 2005 than it would cost now. Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away.

 

[GreatLakes]

Have you looked into driving to a bigger airport? It might be a drive but should be shorter than driving all the way to Florida.

 

[Colleen27]

The pandemic difficulties are hitting harder at small airports and those without a lot of flight alternatives. We've flown.... stops to count... a total of 16 flight segments since things started reopening in fall of 2020 and haven't had any major problems. Minor schedule changes and some shorter or longer layovers than we initially booked, but nothing seriously disruptive. DD20 has also flown another 10 times either to or from school since the start of the pandemic, most of those trips with one stop. She did run into two big snafus - her flight home when the dorms closed in March 2020 was impacted by the covid outbreak in Chicago air traffic control, and her flight back to school in August 2021 was during one of Spirit's major cancellation events. The former was a real hassle because everything was closing down and changing so quickly; she was able to get home without spending more, but it involved sleeping a night in the Denver airport on the first of two layovers and eating dinner from a vending machine because food service was also disrupted. The second was only a minor headache; I paid to rebook her on a flight that wasn't cancelled to get her back to campus on time for her RA training and Spirit eventually refunded the difference. It took them about 8 weeks, but it did all work out in the end. That's the advantage of flying out of a very busy hub airport - when DD's 5am flight was cancelled, there were other flights leaving at 7am, 9am, noon, etc. and some did have empty seats.

We used to fly out of a much smaller airport that is more convenient to our house but stopped even before the pandemic because of the infrequency of flights. If a scheduled flight from there is cancelled, it could be a day or two before the next one, and after a friend lost three days of a week's vacation that way, I decided the Detroit airport was worth the hassle after all.

 

[LilyWDW]

In 2018 my friend and I drove to Disney from Indianapolis. I swore off EVER driving that again...

Here we are in 2022 planning on driving in December due to flight costs, staffing issues, and all the stories of people acting like fools on the plane. I already hate flying. I am claustrophobic and have anxiety so it is not a good combination for flying. So we are renting a car (my friend feels more comfortable driving a rental then driving my car... and her car would never make the trip).

 

[Nora03]

I follow a travel blog and the couple were flying from Chicago to Florida late last week. Their flight was cancelled due to “weather” and rebooked them on two flights that would have caused them to miss their transatlantic cruise. So they booked on another airline and had no weather problems or even delays. Unbelievable!

 

[RangerPooh]

When we lived in a rural area we had a similar airport. Two, maybe three flights per day, but possibility for delay. We would often drive the 1.75 hours to a bigger airport to avoid these issues. We now live in a larger metro area, but it still has its challenges. Our last few trips we drove the 13+ hours each way. On our trip two weeks ago DH and I did fly as it was a race weekend, but it had its own delays. It's residual from the pandemic. Flexibility is key.

 

[diznygirl]

We cancelled a trip to California because nobody in the family wants to go anywhere near an airport currently. It’s just such a miserable experience. Wish it was an easier drive from Florida.

 

[ronandannette]

Well, the pandemic happened and airlines are still trying to figure their way back from that. And if you're at a small airport and not a hub, all these logistical shifts are going to affect you more than anywhere else.

And our national airlines are certainly being very challenged to do so. Some of the kinks are being worked out; my last flight didn't get changed at all and I've got two upcoming ones in the near future that haven't been changed yet either. What really isn't good is how hard flight frequency has been hit. There are just so many fewer flights now. There used to be 3 flights a day from YYC to LAX (two direct) and now there's one a day and it's only direct 3 days a week.

The biggest answer is that flights got more competitive, i.e. cheaper. I also remember regularly having an open seat next to me and getting a meal on my 3 hour flight to Florida, but it also costed more in 2005 than it would cost now. Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away.

Good gravy, not here in Canada. Both our national airlines now codeshare with every major US carrier so there's really no price competition at all. We don't have access to the US economy carriers at all because none of them fly across the border. The prices of flights both domestic and international from Canada have increased substantially post-Covid.

 

[bcla]

Isn't that always a possibility at small airports with limited schedules? Aircraft need to operate long daily schedules to justify their cost, and that means a plane might be flying for 16 hours from point to to point with different crews. But that's a careful dance. It all cascades when there are problems, but that's magnified at small airports that don't get a lot of traffic and there aren't additional flights that can accommodate those with cancelled flights.

 

[spiders]

I will admit I am biased but I still think air travel is fantastic. On the average day, the overwhelming majority of people make it to their destination on time and a crash will still make worldwide news because that’s just how safe it has become...you expect the number to be 0 even though there are literally thousands of airplanes in the air at any given time.

We take for granted that you can cross the country in just a matter of hours and that it is normal to expect a package sent from Miami at 6PM to be delivered to your door in Seattle by lunch.

You can certainly drive and you can certainly spend the 6/8/10/16 hours it takes to drive but I would rather spend that same amount of time in an airport on a chair with my iPad than in a car seat.

 

[abdmom]

DS16 goes to boarding school in the northeast and has done a lot of flying the past 4 months. He has not had a journey go smoothly yet. So far, he has: 1) Missed a flight because his uber didn't show and TSA was backed up at the airport. 2) Had a direct flight cancelled hours before it was supposed to leave. The only available flight out that he could rebook had 2 legs and arrived close to midnight. 3) Had a flight delayed 4 hours so that it arrived at 3 am. I was picking him up and it's a 75 minute drive each way. 4) Almost miss his flight because the line for baggage dropoff was over an hour.

I almost forgot the flight from hell that he experienced in summer, 2021 when I lived overseas. He was on a 10 hour flight to where I was living at the time. Once the plane got over the ocean, a doctor complained that one of the doors was making too much noise and insisted that it was a medical hazard. They turned back over the ocean and landed in a US airport, planning to fly the passengers out the next day. The problem was - ds is 16 and can't check into a hotel. So the airline quickly got him onto a flight that got him closer to me. I had to hop onto a flight leaving my airport and meet him where the new flight was landing, meet him at the airport, check into a hotel because there were no more flights leaving to my airport after his flight landed, and fly both of us out the next day.

 

[sheilafri]

In 2018 my friend and I drove to Disney from Indianapolis. I swore off EVER driving that again...

Here we are in 2022 planning on driving in December due to flight costs, staffing issues, and all the stories of people acting like fools on the plane. I already hate flying. I am claustrophobic and have anxiety so it is not a good combination for flying. So we are renting a car (my friend feels more comfortable driving a rental then driving my car... and her car would never make the trip).

I’ve rented cars for long road trips several times in the past. It can make a lot of sense.