Nosedive: international air travel goes from bad enough to worse
INTERNATIONAL travel has always been a tradeoff. You endured cramped aircraft seats and long, tedious flights over featureless oceans because at the other end, you were rewarded with interesting experiences in new places.
To put it another way, the bad was more than offset by the good. But I question whether that’s still the case.
The nature and quality of international travel has changed, and with it the balance between positive and negative. In the past, this balance invariably tilted towards the former. But as my wife and I exited Wellington Airport recently after returning from our first overseas trip since Covid19 struck, I decided I would need a very compelling reason before I could be tempted to travel abroad again.
What’s changed? Well, 9/11 for a start. The attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 triggered the introduction of increasingly intrusive and timeconsuming security checks, which mean you can spend as much time in airport terminals as in the air.
Over time, those security measures have become more oppressive and authoritarian. We grudgingly accept that they were instituted for our safety, but I often wonder whether the people who make and enforce aviation security rules are doing what officious types have always enjoyed doing, namely, exerting authority over their fellow human beings simply because they can.
Some officials try to be courteous, but many make no attempt to ameliorate the inherent indignity of the process. On the contrary, their manner is brusque and hectoring. Passengers are herded and marshalled like livestock.
The bossiness is clearly infectious, since it has spread to airline cabin crew. Almost from the moment you check in, but especially once you’re on the plane, you’re assailed with instructions about what you can and more often cannot do.
These are often delivered without any redeeming graciousness or charm.
Of course, there are great cabin crew who do their best to treat passengers well and respectfully. In fact I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that the enjoyment factor in flying isn’t determined so much by the airline as by the quality of the crew.
You can strike a lousy crew on a supposedly good airline and viceversa. But a consistent factor across all airlines is that the efforts of individual crew members can be negated by the dehumanising authoritarianism of the total flying experience.
To all this must now be added a more recent disincentive to travel. Covid19 has delivered a doublewhammy, placing huge strain on airlines and airport infrastructure as international travel ramps up again, but in addition giving bureaucratic busybodies all the excuse they need to place new obstacles in people’s paths.
On our recent trip to and from the US, my wife and I were relatively lucky. All our flights left on time. Problems arose only when we arrived at LAX, where we queued for three hours to get through Customs and Border Protection. Despite having allowed what we thought was ample time to catch a connecting flight, we made it after a dash with only minutes to spare.
Staff shortages caused by Covid seemed the obvious explanation. The same issue, presumably, was responsible for a delay of more than an hour getting through transit at
Sydney Airport on the way home, where a single security official was screening the cabin baggage of hundreds of passengers waiting to catch connecting flights.
We had plenty of time, so in this case the delay didn’t bother us greatly. But not for the first time, I wondered why we had to undergo security screening all over again having done it already before leaving LAX.
At no stage had we left a secure area. What lethal contents could possibly have found their way into our bags in the meantime?
But that wasn’t the biggest cause of frustration on our homeward journey. Checking in at LAX, we were told we couldn’t enter New Zealand without first completing something called a travellers declaration. Our travel agent hadn’t mentioned it and nothing was said about it in the several text messages we received from Qantas supposedly advising us of all the formalities we had to complete before travelling.
Long story short: we filled in a hardcopy declaration and were told to present it on arrival in New Zealand. What the checkin clerk didn’t tell us was that if we completed the form online, we would be issued with a QR code that would enable us to pass straight through the E gate at Wellington.
Instead we had to queue for more than hour again with a long line of foreign passport holders waiting to be processed manually.
And here’s the final affront: there was no information in the travellers declaration that wasn’t also in the standard arrival form we filled out on the plane. The declaration was, in other words, totally superfluous; just another meaningless hoop to jump through. The official at the immigration desk barely gave our forms a glance.
Oh, and did I mention that we had to submit all our bags for yet another Xray screening — the third — before leaving the airport?
The upshot of all this is that I’ve decided international travel post9/11, and now postCovid, is no longer worth the hassle. And it wouldn’t surprise me if other travellers, having endured similar experiences, will also now reassess the benefits against the downsides and decide the equation has irrevocably changed for the worse.