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12-28-2008, 10:45 PM

#7

⌐ AV8OR WANNABE

Gets Weekends Off

Joined APC: Mar 2006

Posts: 3,333

I overheard an interesting conversation on a flight yesterday. I flew AA (commercial, not jumpseat) from DFW to LAX and was upgraded to first class

– still not sure why but I didn’t complain and made sure to say thanks.

The flight was full and the first class section had 18 seats. When I boarded I noticed that the overhead bins were really full, I mean the first class section overhead bins were full before even all first class pax had boarded.

Later as I was reading a paper I overheard a conversation between several passengers about some of them having shipped almost all of their “checked bags” – one guy said, “heck if I gotta pay $50 for it I’ll rather ship it because that way it’ll never get lost”.
Then another passenger chimed in – “yeah, and you get a tracking number as opposed to ‘please describe what your bag looks like?’ in Lost & Found.”

The next thing I know our flight attendant gets into the conversation saying, “yeah I don’t blame you folks, I hate that we charge for bags now and frankly all our flights are so full nowadays sometimes they have to bump the bags for weight and balance purposes” (I was surprised how honest she was with the folks).

Either way, before I knew it almost everyone in the first class section was chit-chatting about this and based on the conversations 7 out of the 18 first class passengers had shipped their bags! I asked which shipper they used (I wasn’t in my uniform and didn’t tell them I was a pilot) and 4 had used fedex and 3 ups. One guys said he chose purple because “Kinko’s is always open whereas the UPS Store closes at night.” Sort of makes sense to me…

Either way, sounds like the extra charges can turn into a win-win situation for the cargo haulers?

Maybe we (UPS and FDX) need to take advantage of those airline checking bag fees and start advertising just like Southwest does?

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