Entry 36: New Zealand Part II

[Note: I thought this entry was a continuation of my trip to New Zealand, but in rereading it, I see that it's actually more of a series of rants. Oh well, I'm posting it either way.]

The only downside of the trip was the flight home. It was delayed for over an hour due to [fill in annoying reason here], and they only served dinner to passengers who prepaid for it upon booking. Apparently, the travel agent that all university employees are forced to book through (which doesn’t make any sense, but that's a story I've saved for below*) didn’t book me a dinner, which was unfortunate as due to the delay it ended up being the only time I would have had to eat a proper meal. As it turned out, my dinner was a chocolate bar from a train station vending machine and a handful of peanuts from a half-eaten bag squished at the bottom of my backpack.

Interestingly, the idea of dinner not being included with a standard ticket is very relevant to a talk I heard at the conference about “demand smoothing”, which as I understand it, basically just means varying prices to reflect short-term fluctuations in demand. One of the points of the talk is that it can sometimes be beneficial, even if it is unpopular. An example the speaker gave was a soda machine that would automatically raise prices on hotter days. This apparently was actually implemented somewhere, but the public reaction was so negative that Coke (or whoever was the operator) quickly scrapped it. The result was that the machine would sell out almost instantly on hot days, and it wasn't worth it for the operator to make a special trip to refill it. If, however, the price was higher, then it would be worth it to make more soda available and more people could be serviced. Those people who wanted a cold Coke on a hot day badly enough could have one.

Tying this back in with airlines, I don’t always mind when airlines require the customer to pay “extra” for certain services (although, it does suck to be super hungry and watching the two people next to you eating a hot meal, even if it is airline food), because it probably means a lower base ticket price, and then only the people who want the additional services have to pay for them.

Take the Bags Fly Free campaign of Southwest Airlines. Do you think Southwest is actually foregoing anything financially to let “bags fly free”? Is this some sort of goodwill gesture on their part to help cash-strapped travelers, or are they simply redistributing the costs to all their customers whether they bring a bag or not? To somebody like myself who goes out of his way to travel as light as possible, bags fly free probably means I get to pay a little more, because somebody else wants to pack their hair dryer.

And not to sound like a dick, but how dumb are people if this type of advertising actually works? Bags fly free, sure they do. In no way are luggage costs considered when setting ticket prices. In fact, all the people at the check-in counter, and all the people driving those little baggage shuttles loading and unloading suitcases, they are actually volunteers. They work for nothing so that your bags can fly free. I’m just waiting for a competing airline to announce, “not only do bags fly free, but we give you a discount if you don’t bring a bag!” That’d learn Southwest good.

And another thing, can’t we get a separate check-in line based on how much luggage one has? There is nothing worse than having a backpack and a laptop, and being stuck in the middle of a serpentine queue, while a family of seven breaks down their strollers, unloads a cart with approximately 50 suit cases in it, and scrambles to find their passports. A man in line behind me hit the nail on the head, when he turned to his wife and said, “They should have two queues, one for efficient people and one for inefficient people.” Exactly. If only such a system were possible.

I was thinking of this as T and I were trying to hurry through customs so as to catch our train from Sydney to Newcastle (we just made it). A rather robust woman in front of us had to empty some things from her suitcase and she put them right in the walkway and was taking her time to gather them. I stepped around her and in doing so gently brushed her possessions. When she gave me a dirty look I said, “Sorry, we’re in a hurry.” To which she replied snottily, “Yes, we all are.” To which I replied, “You're in a hurry? You sure ain’t moving like it. I've seen unaus move faster than you, and they are two-toed South American sloths.” Actually, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and took off running. Really, she kind of had a point. Nobody wants to be stuck at the airport, and I normally wouldn’t act as if my time was more valuable than anybody else’s. It’s just that I really didn’t want to spend the night at the Sydney train station. That's all.

Anyway, the flight back wasn’t all bad, because I watched Goodfellas (I paid extra for it, by the way). Goodfellas was one of those, “What you’ve never seen [classic movie title] before? You have got to see it,” movies for me. I feel like I’m often let down by these movies, but not Goodfellas. It really is great. I mean, you gotta love movie from the which The Sopranos apparently got about two-thirds of their cast.

*So, my rant about travel agents. As somebody who doesn’t particularly like planning, I understand the purpose of travel agents. My parents are using one for a trip here and the agent has managed the logistics of almost all the traveling and event scheduling. That’s a worthwhile service.

What I can’t understand is why travel agents apparently can’t use this newfangled tool called the Internet. One set of airline tickets that were part of the trip with my parents looked to be priced really high to me (like $600/ticket too high), so we told the agent and she got back to us with tickets that were better, but still high (now like $250/ticket too high) saying that that was the best she could do. Not wanting to way overpay, we told her to cancel the tickets altogether. I then went online, and within, literally, twenty minutes I had purchased reasonably priced tickets. And it’s not like I used any tricks or exotic search engines, I think I used Travelocity -- a very well-known travel site that probably pops up immediately in any sort of Google search on airline ticket prices. That’s it. That's all I did.

And the same thing happened to me when I was booking a ticket to the New Zealand conference. For university-related travel, we have to book through an agent, even though it’s completely unnecessary, because academia is full of political bullshit and unnecessary middlemen. When the agent first booked my ticket, it was incredibly overpriced, which is bad, because I have a limit on my travel funds. I literally had to go online find the ticket I wanted, email it to the travel coordinator in our office, so that she could email it to the travel agency, so that they could book it for me. How idiotic is that?

Now, why couldn’t the agents simply save everybody some time and effort, and get me decent ticket prices in the first place? The obvious answer – it’s not their money. When it’s not your money you don’t really care. When it is your money, suddenly two extra clicks on a mouse to save a few hundred dollars, seems worth it. And that's why capitalism works. Now excuse me while I go read The Fountainhead.