How And Why Are Airlines Making their Passengers Miserable on Purpose

This is now a well-established fact that the airplanes are actually doing more to make your travel experience worse by the day. From making passengers wait in long security lines to the abrading process and the exorbitant excessive fees, is making the air travel a really hellish experience by the day.

Airlines are making their best to make the air travel more horrible for its passengers and its all for the sake of making more money. Today we are going to tell our readers as to how and why are airlines making their passengers miserable on purpose.

Charging extra fees

Nowadays, airlines are making money through what they call the ‘Calculated misery’. The majority of the income the airlines today make is through charging excessive fees such as extra legroom, more luggage carrying capacity and the quicker boarding process. This means that the baseline services are being made terrible so that people will pay more to acquire them.

Overbooking Flights

Airlines overbook the flights on a regular basis but why? The airlines use certain algorithms that allow them to determine as to when they can overbook, how much they can overbook and to do so how many passengers they can deplane. Although these airlines are all asking for any volunteers to deplane, they can also forcefully boot any passenger off their flight.

To add on more misery, there is actually no law that can stop these airlines from booting their passengers which means that the selection process is all for the crew of the aircraft to dictate.

Water is not cleaned intentionally

The water on airplanes is really disgusting. Actually, it’s so unclean that even the flight attendants refuse to drink plain water or coffee made from it. The bacteria level is well over the required limit. Airlines often say that they are EPA compliant for their water reserves but it usually occurs when EPA retests their water supply on spot.

These failures happen more than usual such as nearly 80 planes every year fail this EPA testing. The longer a flight is dirtier the water on it.

Placing smaller seats to make more rooms in airplanes

Did you felt that the cabins of the airplanes are shrinking by each year? If you think that you are imaging things, well you are wrong because the average size of a seat since 1970 has been shrunk from 18 to 16.5 inches in width and the spacing between the rows has decreased by 35 to 31 inches.

Why do you ask? Isn’t it obvious? Smaller seats along with narrower rows mean more paying customers.

Not washing blankets and pillows

For those of you, who are flying economy, do not trust that the airplane pillows and blankets are clean and washed. Despite the flight attendants telling passengers that the pillows and blankets are washed at least 12 hours before the flight takes off, they are mostly refolded after the previous flight.

Only first-class gets clean and washed pillows and blankets.

Massive fees for rescheduling a flight

If you happen to have taken a quick flight but then a sudden need for the rescheduling arises, then hold on to your wallets because these rescheduling fees can be more than your original ticket. Airlines say that they are entitled to these high fees because if a person misses their flight, they are paying for the opportunity costs that their company would have to incur.

In order to avoid these high rescheduling fees, you can avoid them by either canceling or changing the flight within 24 hours of the booking. Also, a person can book 2 pone way tickets instead of one round-trip ticket and this way their flight times can become flexible.

Delaying food on purpose

Nowadays it seems that you are getting less and less food served to you. The thing is that the flight attendants are actually holding out serving meals deliberately. According to anonymous flight attendants, they hold off meal service for as long so that more passengers can fall asleep and they would have less work to do.

Manhandling fragile luggage of passengers

Ne airport worker actually wrote on Reddit about how they treat the luggage of passengers,

“Don’t expect handlers to handle your baggage with great care. Most employees don’t throw with it. But when in a belly of an airplane where you can’t work with a straight back and try to fit 200 pieces in a compartment. Think what you will do with the last 50 pieces of baggage… So don’t put stuff in like bottles of wine / laptops etc. ‘Cause the handlers don’t know what’s in it and they only act on how heavy a piece of luggage is.”

Another airport worker said, “Your luggage and other bags will not be treated with proper care. If you do not want anything to break, then wrap it up real nice and well.”

Slowing down the boarding process for excessive fees

Majority of airlines actually start boarding passengers from back to the front which usually takes a lot of time. They do so that some people can pay extra fees for the priority boarding or for the first class tickets or better yet some other sort of perks for getting quicker on the plane.

Not updating their Wi-Fi

The Wi-Fi on airplanes is so bad that if often you start a movie and it starts to buffer midway and then remains buffering. The problem lies with the Wi-Fi provider which is mostly Gogo for the majority of airlines. The company itself stated that now more and more passengers have smartphones and the company’s aging technology is not coma plaint with them and thus results in low bandwidth on planes.

In addition to that, upgrading the internet on airlines is a costly process and the airlines claim they do not have enough cash reserves for it. Plus they will have to ground plane for at least half a week to install the new technology and this can cost airlines their precious revenue.

Lies about when to use the smartphone on an airplane

While the older mobile phone technology might have interfered with the controls of the airplane, the technology today is really sophisticated and modern smartphones cannot do any harm to it. As per the words of an aviation safety expert,

“As for cell phone use on aircraft, the technology exists, but the hesitance is, again, public demand. More passengers view this as an annoyance rather than a benefit of travel. It is bad enough being a passenger close to people who talk loudly to their neighboring passengers; add cell phone use and the result may be worse than the few seat reclining events of late.”