Airline’s shabby weigh of doing things

LAST Thursday our Townsville to Melbourne flight was delayed for nine hours at considerable cost to myself.

The saga continues. I had to come back to Townsville a day early due to an insurance claim on my house.

I was charged $ 95.95 to bring my flight forward a day.

I had paid for and had an allowance of 20kg of luggage. My luggage came to 8kg ( so 12kg of unused weight). The bloke beside me was also 4kg under his allowance of weight. That’s 16kg allowed for, paid for, but not used.

We start to board and I see a young bloke has a backpack and laptop. He’s put to one side, it appears he is over his allowance for on board luggage. There is a weigh station, weighing the overhead luggage!

My overhead luggage came to 3kg and I am allowed to move into the queue. I shout to the young fella to put his laptop on with mine, he does and the whole weight came to 8.34kg – he is/ we are, still 1.34kg over and they still insist on charging this young man for extra luggage, ($ 50) to which he is rightly in my opinion objecting to.

There are others with children boarding the plane with plenty of overhead luggage and there are also those just walking on with a phone and a wallet and earphones.

I do wonder, though, why on our Townsville to Melbourne trip the overhead luggage was limited to 12kg not 7kg as at the Melbourne end. Was that a sweetener because they had delayed a plane full of people for nine hours?

Could it be that Tigerair is taking advantage of people just to make a quick buck ... surely not!

The young man became so aggrieved that in the end he wasn’t allowed to travel. His ticket was blown.

Once we were airborne I decided to count the vacant seats. All up, I counted 48 vacant seats.

Now, there were four hostesses on board who were standing, even though they do not sit with the passengers.

I will, therefore, reduce this number to 44 vacant seats. Also being the good Christian that I am, I will allow for two people to be in the loo when I was counting. So that is now reduced to 42 vacant seats ( so much for me inconveniencing Tigerair that they had to charge me $ 95.95 to go on this flight, heaven forbid, they could have been one more passenger down). But I digress …

Given that the average weight of a person is about 75kg that is 3150kg that was not on that plane, nor were their 7kg of allowable overhead luggage, that is a further 94kg and they could not afford this young chap 1.34kg? Or was it the case they just wanted to make some poor sucker pay more?

Shame, shame, shame on your greediness, Tigerair. You have today lost two customers, probably three, if the young man has any sense, and I will be telling all and sundry about this incident today, perhaps you will lose more.

Qantas, I am very sorry for leaving you, but I am coming back. KERRY RIELLA,

West End.