Right before Christmas I was in Ohio for work. I was scheduled to fly out on the 23rd for my Christmas break. I was scheduled to fly through Philadelphia.
I hate the Philadelphia airport. I also hate U.S. Airways (useless airways).
Given these two constants, it’s no surprise that I became stranded in the U.S. Airways terminal of Philadelphia. Thankfully for me, they booked me for a flight the following morning. Unfortunately, there were a whole bunch of people who didn’t get out on time. I hope that their holidays weren’t too stressful and that they did get back in time to see their families. Holiday Travel can be so frustrating.
Families are great! Stay tuned for a Christmas recap!
Philly is the worst… A bad situation got worse last year when the basically stopped using Pittsburgh as a hub, and a lot of that traffic started going through Philly.
A couple of months ago, I was stuck in a plane TAXIING for a solid hour and fifteen minutes due to ground congestion. No kidding, I’m not even counting the time I was sitting in the plane before push back. At one point, when we were traveling perpendicular to the main taxiway and I could see, I counted 17 planes in front of us (and those were just the ones that were visible.) Add to the situation that it was blisteringly hot, and that plane’s air conditioning doesn’t work when it’s not moving. It was deplorable.
In better news, I found that there were direct flights to Harrisburg (my actual destination). Although not cheap, I refuse to fly into Philly anymore. Harrisburg is like the heaven of airport. There has never been a single person in line at security all of my flights have been on time, and nobody goes there, so the flights are usually only 50% full.
Over the holiday I did some significant traveling on US Airways and while we made all our connections (due to a 4 hour lay over) I will avoid traveling with them ever again. Every single person we talked to on multiple days seemed pissed to have to do their job. We weren’t asking anything out of the ordinary… the flight attendants were pissed to have to serve drinks, gate help was pissed to have to direct us to connecting flights, and we barely made it through security on time because the woman at the check in counter almost had a panic attack when she couldn’t figure out how to print boarding passes. I flew delta yesterday and was surprised at the drastic difference in personnel… People were actually pleasant and helpful…
Harrisburg – smart idea.
My two flights overseas to Ukraine were organized by Delta. The first half of the trip was operated by Air France which – whoa – was awesome except for the misery of Charles De Gaulle airport. I don’t think I want to go there again.
The return trip was on Delta and it was okay. The food certainly wasn’t as good as on the Air France flight but really? we all got there okay and that’s all that really matters.
Frankfurt is the worst one. It’s awful like whoa.