Vacation 05 - America West? Not Impressed.

Coming Home

Published on July 4, 2005 By chiprj In Blogging

I bought my tickets for the vacation on CheapTickets.com. It was a last minute thing and I was able to get a decent deal there. There were two problems with that course of action, though. The first was that I flew four different airlines and none of them were United (with whom I have a frequent flyer account). That wasn't really a big deal to me, but I would have liked to rack up a few miles.

The second was that my entire trip home was on America West. These guys were built for cheaptickets.com. I'm a firm believer in you get what you pay for. It seems to me that this company have come up with a plan to get people to fly them. They cut their prices a little and they appear a little higher on the listings. In return, you get flights from Cleveland to Phoenix that offer nothing more than a beverage service. Oh, they had breakfast, but it was $5 for a breakfast bagel sandwhich and $2 for a box with raisins and oranged juice (the offered OJ for free on the drink cart). They also wanted $5 for headsets (I always carry my own headsets). Now, they did warn us at the gate that if we wanted to eat, we could run down the concourse to McDonalds or Starbucks and bring something on board since they'd be charging more than the airport prices for food but they waited until about 20 minutes before boarding to announce this. I had noticed the lines at all the breakfast joints were already roller coaster long when I walked to my gate, so I didn't even bother.

By the time we landed in Phoenix, I was really hungry. I quickly hiked over to my gate and then found the nearest place to grab a bite to eat that also had a short line. I got to have a small pizza hut pepporoni pizza that was only greatly overpriced. But that's the nature of eating in airports. I also hit the newstand for a paper and a snack. I was continuing on America West and figured if they didn't serve free breakfast on a four hour early morning flight, there wouldn't be anything offered on the hour and a half flight to Monterey. I was wrong, I got a nice cup of 7-Up (which as we all know is much better than a tall glass of STFU).

Don't get me wrong, the flights didn't suck. I was just annoyed by the 'no perks' plan of America West. And, of course, that's more my fault for picking a flight plan on the cheap side of the listings. Next time, even if I use cheap tickets, I'll be a little more choosy.

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