There are virtues to flying and staying in paid lodgings. You get where you want to go fast, read intensely while doing so (fear and being jammed against strangers are powerful concentrators), and once on the ground, your room each day is magically made clean and neat.
But we come to accept such blessings of modernity without thought. It is the annoyances that stick in the memory, like the husks of popcorn kernels lodged in the gums. After a steady bout of travel, rather than counting your blessings, you find yourself heatedly asking questions that begin with, “why can’t they . . . ?”
On the ground, I’ve stayed in motels with beds so hard I dreamed of prisons; water so hard that rinsing took longer than washing; light so dim I started packing my own 75-watt bulb, and walls so thin I’ve overheard the subtle nuances in pillow talk from the next room.
Most of my gripes stem from the work of designers, architects, marketing executives and business managers who never have to use what they serve up to the public. They should be required to. Here’s my list.
First, while I have complaints about bad mattresses, terrible lighting, blankets and bedspreads that are never cleaned, and suffocating ventilation and heating systems, I’ll focus here on something of importance to most business travelers: Why can’t hotels and motels provide efficient and fair telephone service?
– Telephone access charges, for example. Hotels and motels get you in the wallet one way or another . . . outrageous prices for room service, laundry and dry cleaning, or their current fave, access charges. Even if you use your telephone credit card, the hotel charges you anywhere from $1.50 to $3.50 per call just to use it. Pure greed. Before you book a room, ask what the access charges are.
– Most lodgings place the phone on the nightstand next to the bed. Then they fit it with a 4-foot-long cord so you can’t use it at the desk, which, if you are lucky enough to be in a room that has one, is probably on the far side of the room.
– Try dialing information from your hotel or motel. Try 411. Try 1411. Try 555-1212. Try 1-555-1212. Try everything you know to try, and sooner or later you find, in many cases, that you have to make a long distance call–local area code, plus the information number–to get a listing for a business or residence three blocks from the hotel.
– Some hotels and motels still wire their telephones directly into the wall. This makes it impossible for laptop computer owners to use their modems, unless the phones contain a dataport. A hotel that is not computer friendly in 1996 is a hotel that could be hurting for business in 1997.
In the air, my gripes are space and safety. My safety concerns are partially fanciful. I have wondered why, for example, they can’t rig airplane fuselages with giant parachutes, and develop a fuel oil that won’t explode on impact.
More to the point, after all these years of building airplanes, why can’t they:
– Eliminate center seats. Face it, no one wants them. They are hot, cramped and uncomfortable. You have no territorial claim on either the left or right armrest. Sitting in the middle seat is like being placed in a straitjacket.
– Make seats big enough to accommodate derrieres wider than that of the average pygmy. With all the studies showing that Americans are getting bigger and heavier, some major airlines seem to be buying narrower seats.
– Space the seat rows farther apart so that when the passenger in front of you decides to hit the recline button and nod out, your newspaper doesn’t get crushed and you don’t get their hair in your face.
– Make reading lights with beams that passengers can direct. I’ve sat in airplane seats where the lights, if they’re working at all, are aimed too far to the left, too far right, too far forward, or too far back–and there’s not a thing you or the flight attendant can do about it because the fixtures in most cases are in sealed units, inaccessible to all but service mechanics.
– Provide toe room for bulkhead seats. Sure, there has to be a bulkhead, just as there has to be a closet or food storage bin behind it. But what harm would it do to lose a few inches at the bottom for toes?
– Acknowledge that more people carry on luggage these days than check it. What business traveler wants to wait around at a luggage carousel until his sleek new ballistic nylon suit bag turns up late and dirty–if at all? It all gets X-rayed anyway. So why don’t the airlines give in and build bigger luggage racks?
They can do it at the same time they make the bigger seats and the fuselage parachutes.
