I was in Vancouver last week for a load of partying meetings for work, along with a motley crew of my colleagues. Among them was the spindly giant Tony, towering morosely over the rest of us at something like six feet five inches. Our company operates a rather fatalistic Lynyrd Skynyrd/Manchester Utd. travel policy forbidding more than three of us from taking the same flight, and so Tony was paired with new guy Ian on a British Airways 747 while the rest of us flew with Air Canada.
“I hate BA,” Tony informed us on receipt of this news, a few weeks before the trip. “Air Canada has an extra inch of legroom in economy class.”
I am not, it must be said, anywhere near six feet five inches tall, and nor am I fanatical about airline seating arrangements. Oh sure, I know what Seatguru is, but I can also sleep soundly through the night before a flight rather than compulsively reloading an online check-in page to see if 14B is available yet. I volunteered to swap with Tony.
Last Monday, Ian and I rocked up at Edinburgh Airport for the first of our two flights: a short hop down to the new and apparently exciting Terminal 5 at Heathrow.* We checked in using the automatic machines, and found that while Ian could choose his seat on the second, longer flight, I couldn’t.
“Any chance we could sit together on the second flight?” we asked the woman at the baggage drop. “It’d be good to be able to discuss the agenda for next week.” Boring, but true; I didn’t care which seats we got together so long as we could tick off a few boxes on the agenda and then hit the booze trolley without feeling guilty.
“You’ve been involuntarily upgraded,” the woman said to Ian. “The flight’s been over-sold and you’ve been bumped up to World Traveller Plus.” She looked over at me. “You haven’t.”
I attempted to look stricken. Better seats or not, I wanted me some of that good ol’ premium economy service. “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll mark you ‘suitable for upgrade’. Ask again at the check-in down in Heathrow.”
The flight down to London was quick and we pounced on the first customer services desk we saw. “We were told to ask about upgrades here,” I explained, and we trotted out our business travel sob story once more. “So you see, Ian has been upgraded to premium economy but it looks like I haven’t…”
They took our boarding passes, conferred, spent a few minutes examining their computer screens and finally printed out a new boarding pass. They handed it to Ian. “There you are! Club World. Enjoy your flight, sir.”
Ian picked up his new boarding pass in joyous disbelief and I hesitantly retrieved my unchanged, plebeian counterpart. “What just happened?” I asked them.
“Oh, don’t mention it, sir!” Enjoy the flight,” they beamed.
My incredulity bounced off the armour of their smiles, and we walked away to catch the underground tram to the other side of the terminal where our connecting flight was waiting. Ian was gleeful but apologetic (“Maybe we can swap half way through the flight?”) while I tried to work out exactly how we’d managed to transform a simple upgrade request into a truly Victorian class divide.
We spotted another customer services desk on the way to the departure gate and agreed to have one final try, tag-teaming the customer services assistant with our well-honed spiel. The assisstant took my proffered boarding pass, printed out a new one and matter-of-factly handed it back.
“Okay, you’re sitting together in Club World. Here’s your new boarding card.”
To quote a few lines from a recent (unrelated) email I received from Doug:
b o s h
back of the net
spiceworld
jurassic park
As near as I can describe it, I felt like I’d been told I was the heir to the De Beers fortune.
To cut a long story short, the flight was excellent. The Club World section aboard the plane was like a Stanley Kubrick/2001 reimagining of a really quite decent restaurant: lot of plastic; personal video screens and adjustable couches; moderately good food and excellent wine. There was so much legroom I couldn’t touch the other end of my personal pleasure pod with my feet. It was no longer legroom; it was just room.
And now every subsequent flight for me is ruined.
* Therein lies another obsession for your average business traveller: the relative merits of any given terminal building versus some Utopia they had the good fortune to visit once upon a time. Already crushed by failing to book an aisle seat on an exit row, they’ll arrive at Terminal 2B of some regional airport in the Balkans and loudly bemoan the lack of a Starbucks outlet or the injustice of a broken travelator. “If only this was JFK circa 1996,” they lament.
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Ah, yes. Welcome to the part of your life where air travel now is nigh intolerable, and where you develop an addiction to mild narcotics just to get used to it. One cross-Atlantic first class trip is all you need to realise your dreams of being ‘that guy’: the one who washes down a few sleeping pills with a slug from a bottle of Duty Free whisky before promptly passing out for 9 hours with your mouth open. Or, in my case, ‘that girl’. Congratulations.
Ironically enough, I only started popping sleeping pills (well, the ersatz Nytol variety) after I got back, to help with the dreadful jetlag imparted by the rigours of economy class. I almost wish I’d never been upgraded.
Almost.