Airlines and Their Tricks That Only Work in the 'Digital Age'
11 days ago: Experience With Airlines in 'Web Sites' and in 'Apps'
Recently we experienced the latest and greatest 'upselling' tricks of airlines. What a displeasure. One of them, Air France, wants to charge 150 pounds for luggage (round trip). It hides those fees until later in a booking process. How is one meant to travel without luggage? Backpacking? Why does a suitcase cost 75 pounds to ship in each direction? Seems like a trick for advertising false prices for flights. It used to be 'industry standard' to include suitcases for each passenger (not charge $100 per direction); the commercial flights weren't carriers for post offices and parcels.
Another rather obnoxious thing is, for weeks ahead of flights the airlines (yes, plural; we saw several doing this) try to sell "better seats" or some other "class". They keep bombarding one's inbox, both before the outward and inward trips (2 journeys). In the past, before the Net, airlines could possibly send physical forms for this or make phonecalls, but those would cost them too much to be worth it.
Technology was supposed to make things easier. That's what they told us about automation, efficiency etc. In practice, however, there's only greater nuisance. Before each flight people are expected to "check in online" (later they need to check in at the airport regardless) because they want to overbook flights. This means they give their customers more tasks, including webapps that barely work with any Web browser except two and their derivatives. They offload a lot of work (imagine how much toil it is for ~200 people to create logins and confirm attendance) to the customers so that they can make a little more money by overbooking (i.e. selling/booking more seats than actually exist on the plane!) and "dark patterns" get used to tell people they need to - sometimes must - pay to reserve seats (that's untrue; seats can get assigned when boarding passes get printed).
So doing long-distance journeys generally became more of a nuisance. Then they try to tell people to download/install "apps" (wrongly assuming everyone carries a skinnerbox running Apple/Alphabet spyware). They tell people to scan "codes". They let people interact with terminals instead of the easiest interface: human beings behind a counter.
Later on some "Establishment" media moans about society being "hostile"; people are getting pessimistic and frustrated with "tech", which seems to contribute to rather than lessen anxiety, uncertainty etc. What happens if you come to the airport (no traffic jams or accidents) and the skinnerbox runs out of battery? Then what? What if the skinnerbox malfunctions in some way? What are the contingencies?
See, decades ago people did not have problems like these. They had physical tickets and, failing that, tickets could be issued based on ID documents. There was customer-centric services (not some Web address or a chatbot) and counters were manned (or womanned) all the time. People weren't numbers and barcodes (or QR codes).
People sceptical of the direction technology has taken are not "Luddites". Many of them make apt observations about what happens around them. Some of them still remember how things used to be. █