Emotional About Baggage: The North Terminal at DTW is sparking clean, spacious, well designed, relatively quiet, and generally pleasant -- as you would expect of a state of the art airport terminal that just opened a month ago. Coupled with the enormous and quite lovely McNamara Terminal (the Northwest/Delta hub terminal) which is, I think, about five years old, Detroit Metro has become one of the nicest airports in the world.
But no matter how fine the airport, it can’t make the planes arrive on time. Right now my flight is delayed about 20 minutes, which cuts my transfer time in Atlanta down to about 20 minutes. Cutting it close -- but if I was checking bags they would certainly be lost.
I am not checking bags; I managed to wedge five days worth of clothes and all my gadgets into a couple of carry-ons. I anticipated this situation. I am not a frequent flyer for nothing. With sub-45 minute layovers, carry-on only is the way to go. However, even if I did have ample time, I still would have stuffed everything into carry-ons because of the insane policy virtually all airlines have adopted about adding fees for checked bags.
I’ve gone on about this before -- about how it completely buggers the boarding and deplaning process. In a somewhat naive article in the WSJ, a journalist proposes that if they wanted things to go more smoothly, they would charge for carry-ons rather than checked luggage. That is of course true, but completely misses the point. The charge is not intended to make things go smoothly. It is intended to generate revenue and whether the traveler experience is degraded or not means absolutely nothing to the airlines.
You could argue that charging for carry-ons instead of checked bags would generate similar revenue but would improve passenger experience so why is it not preferable even to airlines. Answer: It would degrade airline employee’s experience. Someone would have to decide when a purse was big enough to be called a carry-on, and then there’s all those extra checked bags -- there would be more pressure to actually have efficient and accurate baggage handling services and frankly why go to all that trouble when you can just charge for checked bags and let the traveler deal with the hassle.
My flight took off about thirty-five minutes late. I would have had about a 2% chance of making my connection but fortunately my plane was the connecting flight. Lucky.
