It is arguably unfair to put the boot into airline baggage handlers, since they are only a symptom of deeper problems with our national airline. Nevertheless, it's a bit like the mugger who comes from a broken home; the ultimate cause behind their behaviour might lie elsewhere and they might be worthy of some sympathy - but that sympathy reaches its limits when it's your kidney they're poking a knife into. Or in this case trying to drop-kick your luggage into the back row of the grandstand.
Some years ago, after having numerous suitcases damaged, I purchased a Pelican case. This came with a lifetime warranty against everything except "shark bite, bear attack and children under five"*. On their web site they had photos of Pelican cases which had survived being blown up in Iraq.
[* = Yes, they are one of those over-hyped American products, but they are still very tough for all that.]
I don't suppose they employ bears or sharks at QANTAS, so they must be using children under five, because the first time I took the case on a flight, it arrived damaged so badly that I had to borrow a screwdriver to open it.
Here is what they managed to do:
 |
| Exhibit A |
It doesn't look so spectacular, but consider that the metal reinforcing for the locking point was torn loose and rammed so deeply into the side of the latching mechanism as to jam it solid. It wasn't possible to open the case by hand. It's a mystery how they managed to achieve this; it must have required considerable force. Did they place it against a sharp edge and jump on it? Did someone repeatedly hit it with a hammer?
In subsequent trips, the case acquired scratches all over, deep gouges in the top, and was sent to the wrong place on one occasion.
The check-in staff used to have a nasty trick they'd play on people.
"Is it fragile?" they would ask.
"Yes," you would reply, hoping to have your case spared the worst of the kicking.
"OK," they would say, "sign this."
And you'd be given a label to sign waiving your rights to claim damages, because your property was "fragile and improperly packed". Checkmate, sucker!
The abuse of baggage, however, is actually one of the least bad aspects of airline travel these days.
I use to be strongly loyal to QANTAS, but now I alternate between airlines. I try QANTAS and they piss me off so much that I vow never to fly with them again. So I travel Virgin. Virgin then manage to piss me off even worse and I think QANTAS weren't so bad after all. So I go QANTAS next time, whereupon they find some new different way to annoy me.
At this stage the reader is probably thinking "First World Problems", and for sure I'm appreciative of the fact that I have (at least currently) safe and (moderately) convenient air travel available at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that things are
unnecessarily and
artificially bad and this is symptomatic of a worse underlying problem. Things could be (and were in the past) so much better.
It seems that both major airlines are engaged in a classic race to the bottom. Dishonest and deceptive practices are the norm. Staff are mistreated. Customers are a fungible commodity - eleven dollars made by annoying and ripping off a (previously) loyal customer is better than ten made by treating them decently.
A couple of examples:
1) Low cost air fares cannot be changed on line, but instead you have to ring them up to do this. Since they already have to set up the software to allow the more expensive fares to be changed, they could do this for cheaper fares at zero cost. Instead they have to spend extra money to employ people to handle the calls.
This is bean-counter logic. You actively spend money to give people on cheap fares a worse experience, in order to make those on the more expensive fares feel like they're getting something extra. It's the sort of thing that no one with a conscience would even think of, but it's more cost-effective than providing value for money, and that's all that matters.
2) Then there are tricks with extra baggage. If you want to take a second piece of luggage, it has to be booked separately, and rather than an endorsement on your ticket, you get sent a separate receipt by email which you have to print out (and it's not even a PDF, just to make printing harder). Sometimes - and this has happened to me - they "forget" to send the receipt and you have to ring them up and hassle them about it. It's all about tricking the careless (and we're all careless sometimes) into not bringing the receipt with them to the airport, so they have to pay again, at an even higher rate, for their baggage.
Naturally people complain and I'm sure they get their money back eventually, but meanwhile QANTAS essentially have an interest-free loan of your money. Again, appealing to the bean-counters. Of course the check-in staff have to bear the wrath of angry customers, but that doesn't appear on the balance sheet.
I could go on here and bore you with a list of further petty grievances: crowded seating, check-in Nazis with idiosyncratic ideas of what may be allowed in baggage, meals which exemplify the term "all sizzle and no steak", frequent-flier programs now rendered a joke, the high incidence of cancelled flights, peculiar pricing policies which often make it cheaper to forfeit a flight rather than rebook, and of course the ever-present Security Theatre, which is just as much a farce as ever. [And to be clear, these complaints apply equally to QANTAS, Virgin and Jetstar.]
What really concerns me, however, is that
aircraft maintenance has not been exempted from this mania for sacrificing everything in the pursuit of the short-term Dollar. We are seeing yet another round of
job cuts to engineering staff in QANTAS.
My understanding is that modern aircraft are like modern cars: they are safer and require less maintenance than previously. Paradoxically, this can be dangerous because it gives an excuse to cut back on maintenance and you can get away with more for longer before a real disaster happens. I have zero confidence that the heavy-handed industrial relations attitude of QANTAS is in proportion to any reduced demand for maintenance.
