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By J. PEDER ZANE
FREQUENT business travelers are called road warriors for a reason — most of them have a collection of war stories, ranging from minor annoyances to full-combat nightmares.
Ask Ron Goltsch, an electrical engineer from West Caldwell, N.J., about the roughly 1,000 business trips he’s made since 1988, and he pulls his finger from a dike of dammed memories. There was the time his boss sent him to visit a client in a Tennessee town “near Memphis.” When Mr. Goltsch arrived at the rental car counter late that night, the flummoxed clerk, after consulting several maps, informed him that his destination was outside Knoxville, a four-hour drive away.
On a flight to Puerto Rico, the passenger in front kept reclining his seat into Mr. Goltsch’s knees, igniting a classic struggle for personal space. When Mr. Goltsch, who is 6 feet 4, described his discomfort, the man rang for the flight attendant and created such a scene that one of the pilots was summoned. The situation was resolved when, to the man’s dismay, Mr. Goltsch was moved to first class.
But his favorite story occurred when the lock on a hotel bathroom’s door became stuck. Clad only in a towel, he twisted, turned, jiggled and shook the knob to no avail. The walls at his fine hotel were so thick no one could hear his banging or calls for help. Channeling his “inner MacGyver,” he considered various options before discovering he could use the rod in the back of the toilet to pop the hinges on the door. “To this day,” he reports, “I won’t close the bathroom door when I’m alone in a hotel.”
Business travel has never been smooth sailing, as Odysseus’s 10-year voyage home attests. Modern globe-trotters do not typically have to deal with seductive sirens, but the difficulties they face are legion. Some complaints are so common and generic that people would barely mention them except that they just can’t help themselves: crying babies and sneezing adults, fellow passengers unfamiliar with soap or too familiar with cologne, people with small bladders who love window seats, travelers who pretend to need a wheelchair to breeze through security, those who are drunk on words or just plain drunk. Hefty seat mates have always been a problem, now aggravated by the swelling ranks of the obese and ever-tighter seats.
“We’re packed in so tight, you wonder why you even need a seat belt,” said Addison Schonland, a partner at AirInsight.com, an aerospace consulting firm in Baltimore. “Perhaps there’s a future for flying on U.P.S. and FedEx — they can give you a roomy box, pick you up at your door and, best of all, get you there on time.”
Uncomfortable seats and limited leg room topped the list of air travel complaints, according to a 2013 survey by TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site. Prices for tickets and services, unpredictable flight delays, long security lines and other passengers rounded out the top five — and this was before the furloughs of air traffic controllers amid sequester-related budget cuts.
Complaints about airline service were up nearly 33 percent last year as airlines tried to squeeze profits from fewer flights with fuller planes. Load factors (passenger-miles as a percentage of available seat-miles) set a record last year, according to the Transportation Department. The result is crowded boarding areas, ferocious struggles for overhead space and straitjacket seating — all of which have sharply increased the stress-heightening “claustrophobia quotient” for passengers and crews, said Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com.
Passengers aren’t the only ones complaining. A 2012 survey of international cabin crews by the global travel search site Skyscanner created a top 10 list of complaints that included passengers who snap their fingers to get attention, talk through the safety demo or ring the attendant bell to complain about the temperature onboard.
Extra fees for bags, meals and “priority” seats — can the coin-operated lavatory be far behind? — add to the annoyances for travelers. So does the tacit gag order against passengers in place since the security crackdown of 9/11; though precautions have eased a bit in recent years, they still make airports and planes feel to some like police states. And so most passengers — excluding, of course, Alec Baldwin — turn off their electronic devices during takeoffs and landings upon command, even though there is little evidence cellphones and tablets pose safety issues.
Musicians who travel with bulky, expensive instruments encounter special problems in this environment. Delta Air Lines recently stripped the cellist Lynn Harrell of half-a-million frequent miles he had accumulated for himself and his nearly 300-year-old seat mate. “Cello Harrell” is welcome to have a seat , but can’t earn miles.
Another musician, Dave Carroll, became so frustrated when he couldn’t get any satisfaction after his instrument was damaged in transit that he filmed a music video, “United Breaks Guitars,” where he sings:
“You broke it, you should fix it
You’re liable, just admit it
I should’ve flown with someone else
Or gone by car
’Cause United breaks guitars.”
His video has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube, and he has published a book by the same title on his battle with the airline.
In the current climate, business travel has become a bitter Darwinian struggle for leg space and breathing room. The great escape for grizzled veterans — frequent-flier perks — are worth less and less as airlines give away more miles through credit cards and other arrangements. The lounges that once offered a calm refuge from frenetic terminals are increasingly packed, Mr. Winship said, and the competition for seat upgrades means that those without the highest frequent-flier status are forced to face off with hoi polloi.
“An upgrade today doesn’t mean moving to first class, but getting to board the plane first so you can find some space for your bag,” said Mr. Schonland, who flew 62,000 miles in the first three months of 2013. “Having high status with an airline used to bring you privileges. Now it just means you have fewer limitations.”
This search for an edge among passengers may explain why a J. D. Power & Associates survey of 14,000 travelers last year found that 70 percent of passengers approved of fees for priority early boarding and more than half felt that the fees for seat upgrades were reasonable, even within coach (some seats have more leg room than others).
Problems do not end when passengers leave the unfriendly skies. The ground war often begins with directionally challenged cabdrivers who eventually ferry business travelers to hotels. Upon check-in, accommodations can feature alarm clocks that go off in the middle of the night; showers that only trickle; weak, expensive Wi-Fi; electrical outlets that seem part of a game of hide-and-seek; and free pets, including bedbugs and mold on drinking glasses.
When Jane Collins asked readers of her column on BlogHer.com to share their travel nightmares, one woman recalled opening her hotel room’s door to find her company’s chief operating officer tapping away on his laptop in his boxer shorts. He wasn’t a masher, just a hard-working guy sent to the wrong room. “Since then,” Ms. Collins said, “I have heard so many underwear and boxer-shorts stories that it must be quite common for hotels to mix up their room cards.”
And yet, even as business travelers are becoming inured to breakdowns in service, many strive for special treatment, perhaps in a quest to maintain some dignity. Kim Reicherter-Specht, an agent with Tzell Travel, one of the country’s largest corporate travel management companies, said frequent fliers accustomed to upgrades sometimes called her to complain from the purgatory that is coach. “I guess,” she said, “this way all the surrounding coach passengers know that, ‘Hey, I travel all the time, I was really supposed to be in first class, not in the back.’ ”
Her Tzell colleague Rina Annousi said many of their clients wanted personal service for the material comforts it brings and the psychological boost. “Everybody likes to be treated well, making you feel how important you are,” she said. “If a hotel can give you a $1,200 room for $800, you think that people respect you and appreciate your position.”
Ms. Annousi said this mind-set could lead to unusual requests or complaints. One client wanted a certain reading lamp and a specific kind of linens in his hotel rooms. Another insisted that all decorative pillows be removed from his room. “One client,” she said with a laugh, “would not press the button on the phone for the concierge, so he called me from halfway around the world to arrange a spa treatment and dinner booking in the hotel.”
Not all business travelers stay at five-star resorts. James Albright, who inspects radioactive materials for the state of North Carolina, is allotted $62 a night from the government for lodging. “I’ve never actually stayed in a place called the Bates Motel, but I’ve come close,” he said.
When he went to turn on the light in one room, he found a hole in the wall with one cockroach and two dangling u-shaped copper wires. “As long as you held them by the black plastic casing, it was easy to connect and disconnect them,” said Mr. Albright. “But it could get tricky when you needed light in the middle of the night.”
When he stepped into a room at another motel, he felt something under his steel-toed boot — a poisonous copperhead snake. When he lifted his leg, it slithered under the bed. “I started to go after it, and then sanity set in,” he recalled. The motel manager disputed his account, but assigned Mr. Albright to another room. “A little later I saw him going to the room wearing sandals, with no socks, carrying a broom and a dust pan. I thought, ‘Good luck with that.’ ”
Another morning he heard a knock at 7:30 a.m. He opened his door to find a young woman in a sheer Carolina blue negligee, asking if she could borrow his iron, much as someone else might ask for directions to the Waffle House. He obliged. “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I’m not complaining.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/bu...gewanted=print
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