Canadian air travellers could only watch enviously last week as Ryanair, the Dublin-based super-discount carrier, announced a radical new policy. From now on Ryanair passengers will get to avoid one of the silliest procedures in an industry rife with them.
Yep, they're shutting down the check-in counters. Passengers themselves now perform the deed online before showing up at the airport, where they simply drop off their bags and proceed through security.
No more snakelike queues. No more being asked whether someone else tampered with your luggage. No more empty minutes spent while the check-in agent stares blankly at a circa-1994 IBM screen for no obvious reason.
Amazingly, it took until 2009 for someone to figure this out. Having long lived in an era when reservations and payments are fully computerized, and when every single traveller carries picture identification, usually a passport, you would have thought they might have al-ready noticed the redundancies in this process.
Granted, online check-in has been a feature of air travel for some time, even for Canadians. But did you ever notice how confusing and poorly directed the whole business became? For want of a clearly indicated separate path, online registrants nevertheless end up in the big snake, waiting for the only obvious place to dump their luggage.
Sometimes that queue passes several electronic check-in booths, which invariably require airline employees to stand there and guide you through what is billed as "self-serve." I have no idea what these machines achieve, since you still remain in the line waiting for your lengthy parlay with the senior agent.
Once you add in the security measures, air travel's protocols have become so opaque and disturbing that standup comics can't even bring themselves to comment any more.
Still, we can only hope that other airlines follow Ryanair's lead, just as in our world, it took WestJet to teach the others that passengers don't really need to present triplicate, red-carbon-paper tickets, complete with five pages of IATA legal boilerplate.
If your ID matches a name on their list, you get on the plane. Duh.
Of course, some consumers will invariably complain about the Ryanair move, which is just another cost-cutter from an airline that has made a fetish of them. Every time you pay a luggage surcharge or purchase water on-board, you can thank the sharp pencils at Ryanair.
In fact, only two days after turfing check-ins, Ryanair announced it is considering charging one pound sterling to use an on-board toilet. This would be a terrible insult anywhere else. But don't forget, Ryanair's business is selling no-frills tickets for trans-European travel at as low as five pounds a seat. A few extra charges are naturally going to ring up. What's insulting is paying full fare at other airlines and still getting the cattle treatment.
And what's just plain weird about air travel is how inconsistent the protocols are from airport to airport. Canadians have never truly understood how those curb-side check-ins outside U. S. airports actually work.
You don't even have to take your bags to some airports. In Las Vegas there are now luggage check-in stations at the convention centre and various hotels.
Since check-in procedures persist in wasting our time, with no advantage to either passenger or airline, more flyers do their best to avoid them. This yields that new breed of traveller who wrangles three or more separate bags onto the plane, overfilling overhead bins, and ultimately forcing you to stow your laptop where your feet should have gone. Later on they boast to their friends that "only chumps check luggage."
I'll tell you one thing. The sooner Ryanair gets to Canada, the better. You won't even need a suitcase. At ten bucks a trip, you can afford to buy whatever you need once you get there.
Kevin BrooKer is a Calgary writer.
Source: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Travel/Checking+into+cheap+flights/1343764/story.html
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