Fuck British Midland Airlines. Fuck them right in the ear

[andrewducker]

So, Julie and I are flying down to Derby with BMIBaby (the low cost arm of British Midland).  And we go to check in online - and are told we can choose to pay an extra £4 to choose our seats, or take what we're given.

No problem, we think, we'll take what we're given - we don't care if we're at the front or the back.

But no - they assign one of us seats at the front of the aircraft and one at the back.

But we can still choose to pay - and looking at the system, we can choose two seats that are handily right next to each other.

So, despite there being pairs of seats, and despite us checking in online on a single form, they allocate the pair of us different seats, just so they can charge us an extra £4?

Oh - and to cap it all, there's no way to leave feedback online, or to email them.  The only way to talk to them is via a phone number that costs 65p/minute (i.e. $1/minute).

Fuck them.  I'm never flying with them again.  There's a certain amount of dickery I'm just not prepared to put up with.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Time-wise planes win, even over Edinburgh->Derby.

And there are other factors to CO2, if you factor in infrastructure then planes win again:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/airliners_greener_than_trains/
Airplanes add in 31%, while trains add over 150% for building and maintaining their infrastructure.

Pricewise, trains certainly can be better, if you get a cheap ticket. I seem to have had bad luck with that recently.

[skington.livejournal.com]

My work commute (Glasgow Kelvindale to London Liverpool Street) is something like 15 minutes slower on the train than the plane - the plane may travel faster, but there's all the faffing about getting to the airport, waiting around, etc.

That paper considers plane infrastructure in isolation, though - add the cost of the extra infrastructure to get people to and from an airport and planes don't look so attractive. Also, noise pollution: planes are loudest around habited areas when they take off and land; trains are quieter, and loudest in the middle of the countryside when they've picked up speed. And CO2 is only part of the emissions problem; not only do trains run on electricity (on any semi-decent line, at least, so not Glasgow-Edinburgh), but we have far more emissions-neutral ways of producing electricity (solar, wind, wave, nuclear) than we do of producing airline fuel. And that's before you consider all the other pollutants planes chuck into the atmosphere, or the multiplicative effects of chucking them directly into the upper atmosphere.

And finally, planes can't stop every hundred miles, or land in a city centre. And the view from a plane is fucking boring compared to a decent train ride.

[andrewducker]

I think it varies a lot - with the trip from Edinburgh to Derby it was 2 and a half hours from Waverly Train Station to Derby by plane (half hour to the airport, hour to check in, hour flight) and four and a half hours by train. If the train station wasn't so close to the airport it would be different, of course.

The majority of train lines in the UK are still diesel, apparently. And very little of the current electricity production is from renewables. Ten years from now it might be very different, of course, at which point the argument will be different.

Oh, and I vastly prefer the view from planes. I love looking down on hills, mountains and estuaries, not to mention the view of clouds you get from above. I do like the view from trains, but sunset/rise from a plane is one of my favourite things.