The Cloud Warriors

As a lifetime fitness enthusiast, I’m the first to admit there is no more tiring undertaking than travel – particularly air travel. I used to joke that if you took your hardest workout routine and doubled that, it would at least begin to resemble the fatigue from flying the friendly skies.

Not to mention all the ancillary pre and post-flight laugh-fests such as security lines, baggage claim and the inevitable delays.

Even on relatively short hops, for example a New York to Florida jaunt, it seems like to takes at least a day for me to feel somewhat normal again.

And in large part the fatigue and aggravation quotient also depends on the airline itself.

Which brings us to today’s subject de jour courtesy of a recent Twitter feed which was immediately (and predictably) posted on Facebook, which rated several airlines in a number of categories.

Now a bad experience on an airline is similar to a similarly horrific experience in a restaurant – it immediately triggers angry Twitter or Facebook postings. One of the time-honored axioms used to be that if you enjoyed a dining experience, you told one or two people, but an experience from a Hell’s Kitchen-type establishment would be recounted to at least 10 people. I will assume that ratio is more or less the same for airline adventures.

In any event, a company that analyzes Tweets and texts analyzed more than 150,000 social media postings of five airlines during the month of August, which is one of the busiest travel months of the year.

The winner according to the collated responses was Virgin Airlines, and the poster child for irate passengers was United.

Now I can’t speak authoritatively about the former because I can’t recall ever having a flight on Virgin, but I can surely wax poetically and in some cases, profanely, about the latter. I won’t regale you with a litany of personal tales of woe as a United passenger, but I will always harken back to a day in 1998 when as one of 150 passengers, I was left sitting on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport for nearly five hours before the flight to New York was canceled due to weather – despite 80 degrees and sunny in Chicago and ditto for LaGuardia. I spent that night sleeping on a conference table at a nearby Hilton Hotel.

Out of nine categories such as luggage, security, on-time take-offs and arrivals and change fees, United came in last or next to last in six of them. I guess that merger with Continental hasn’t worked out quite to management’s expectations. Two other carriers, Delta and JetBlue, turned in high customer marks, while American didn’t fare quite so well.

Okay here’s one more United tale – a friend noticed that my luggage had a sticker for deGaulle Airport and asked me about my trip to Paris – I told him to ask the bag, I went to Chicago, my suitcase went to France.