Hello USA, Goodbye Efficiency

Usually it takes The Frau at least 10 minutes to begin swearing at U.S. inefficiency upon arrival in her home country. On her most recent trip, it only took 30 seconds.

She’s either becoming more and more Swiss or the U.S. is becoming more and more inefficient, she isn’t sure which.

Waiting for a half hour after a ten hour flight

Within 30 seconds of her SWISS flight landing (on time, of course) at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on May 24, the captain came on to announce that the airport had no gate for the plane as well as no gate for several other planes that had arrived before, so everyone would be sitting on the runway until the airport could begin giving planes gates.

The Frau rolled her eyes. But Baby M, being even more Swiss than The Frau since she was born in Switzerland, was even less pleased at such inefficiency. So she screamed at the top of her lungs for the entire half hour the plane sat on the runway.

The Frau tried to explain to Baby M that she was now in another country—her own—and therefore she’d need more patience for anything requiring synchronization or efficiency, but Baby M didn’t care. She thought five hours was enough time to be on a plane—let alone 10, with another half hour thrown in for fun courtesy of ORD—so she refused to calm down.

The Frau couldn’t really blame her. Her wails seemed to echo the feelings of every other passenger as if to say, “Giving a plane a gate. How has this become rocket science for American airports?”

Have you experienced inefficiency at an airport lately?

The Price of Free, Part I

The airline industry has an interesting way of defining free: by charging you for it.

In fact, the airline industry complicates “free” so much, that it’s going to take a few One Big Yodel posts to cover just how complicated free can be.

Let’s start with fares for infants, since Ms. One Big Yodel now has one.

Supposedly, infants (defined by children under two) fly free. I decided to test this theory by booking a flight.

Here’s what “free” means, defined by two different airlines for the same round-trip flight:

ZURICH to CHICAGO on SWISS

Infant price:

-Fare CHF 44

-Fuel Surcharge CHF 328

-Airport taxes CHF 52

TOTAL “FREE” FARE: CHF 424 ($460)

ZURICH to CHICAGO on UNITED (same code-share flight as SWISS)

Infant price: $106.40 (includes one 5-minute dropped call, one 45-minute phone call with a non-native English speaker, and plenty of bad on-hold music to determine)

TOTAL “FREE” FARE: $106.40

Conclusion:

1) As we all knew, nothing is free in Switzerland

2) The USA is no longer the Land of the Free but is still much cheaper than Switzerland

3) The only thing free about the infant ticket was the headache it took to figure out the best price

Have you been amazed by the airline industry recently?

It could have been hell. But it was Swiss.

In some countries, things just work. You pay for them. But they work.

Airlines, for example. This weekend, I flew Swiss from Zurich to Nice. Unfortunately, Nice wasn't very nice (it rained almost the entire time I was there) but Swiss was.

We had boarded the plane in Zurich and we were ready to taxi when the pilot realized something was wrong with the plane. In any other country (or with any other airline) this would have meant crazy delays and hassle, turning my weekend getaway into an extended airport stay. But with Swiss, this problem was taken care of like clockwork. "Naturally, we have another plane for you and we will be ready for take-off again in 45 minutes."

Yeah right.

But this is Switzerland. Within 45 minutes, as promised, we were on a new plane, a bigger plane, told we could spread out and make ourselves comfortable (yay, exit row!) and we were ready to take off, arriving in Nice only about 40 minutes behind schedule.

Then the French took about another 40 minutes to get us our luggage. But that's another story. A French one.