Miloch
October 20th 19, 05:10 PM
https://jezebel.com/airlines-discover-a-new-way-to-make-flying-worse-1839193635
Worried the terrible customer service, tiny seats, baggage fees, lack of food,
and frequent cancellations might not be quite enough to make customers
completely miserable while using their services, airlines have decided that
passengers should probably no longer have TV.
Three major airlines, American, United, and Alaska, are doing away with seatback
television monitors in favor of forcing passengers to either bring their own
devices or just twiddle their thumbs in their tiny seats for a few hours. Or, I
suppose, they could read a book if, unlike me, they can train their eyes on a
page in a cramped, moving space without vomiting.
The reason, of course, is money. Those little screens apparently cost $10,000
per seat, and studies show that they are not really an important factor for
consumers choosing their flights. But perhaps that was because we assumed they
would always be there.
And now, airlines will get to charge $30 for their ****ty wifi so you can watch
a movie you wouldn’t have paid $15 to see when it was in theaters. Also, the
beauty of those seatback TVs was that they did not work without headphones. Now,
there will most likely be a sharp increase in full-volume sounds coming from
dozens of screens in the same cabin at the same time.
Of course, lack of television aboard an aircraft is a twenty-first century
inconvenience that is relatively minor when compared to the travel-related
suffering of yore. The word travel itself is derived from the word travail,
which means “painful or laborious effort.” Two hundred years ago, there was a
very real chance you would die of some foreign sickness on your vacation if your
boat didn’t sink on the journey. But that’s not much consolation for the
present-day when you are stuck in a two-foot square with nowhere to put your
arms using tiny bottles of $10 booze to try and drown out the sound of your seat
neighbor watching Godzilla at top volume on an iPad.
*
Worried the terrible customer service, tiny seats, baggage fees, lack of food,
and frequent cancellations might not be quite enough to make customers
completely miserable while using their services, airlines have decided that
passengers should probably no longer have TV.
Three major airlines, American, United, and Alaska, are doing away with seatback
television monitors in favor of forcing passengers to either bring their own
devices or just twiddle their thumbs in their tiny seats for a few hours. Or, I
suppose, they could read a book if, unlike me, they can train their eyes on a
page in a cramped, moving space without vomiting.
The reason, of course, is money. Those little screens apparently cost $10,000
per seat, and studies show that they are not really an important factor for
consumers choosing their flights. But perhaps that was because we assumed they
would always be there.
And now, airlines will get to charge $30 for their ****ty wifi so you can watch
a movie you wouldn’t have paid $15 to see when it was in theaters. Also, the
beauty of those seatback TVs was that they did not work without headphones. Now,
there will most likely be a sharp increase in full-volume sounds coming from
dozens of screens in the same cabin at the same time.
Of course, lack of television aboard an aircraft is a twenty-first century
inconvenience that is relatively minor when compared to the travel-related
suffering of yore. The word travel itself is derived from the word travail,
which means “painful or laborious effort.” Two hundred years ago, there was a
very real chance you would die of some foreign sickness on your vacation if your
boat didn’t sink on the journey. But that’s not much consolation for the
present-day when you are stuck in a two-foot square with nowhere to put your
arms using tiny bottles of $10 booze to try and drown out the sound of your seat
neighbor watching Godzilla at top volume on an iPad.
*