The RembisReport and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXIX

Goodbye 2022. Hello 2023. Where were you at the stroke of midnight? It doesn't matter as long as you are here in one piece.

I always start writing a couple days early, but will no doubt be writing through the night on the cusp of the new year, as it has been a thing for me to do for many years. I can't sleep on the last day and first morning of the year. I don't know why. That is me.

Maybe I am excited about what is to come, or perhaps pondering what I have seen and done in the past year. It is always a flurry of thoughts and emotions that somehow find their way onto a page like this one.

Along with the end of the year, you always see a bunch of eulogies for people who died during the calendar year. I am not focusing on such a list, there are too many others to compete with. You also hear a lot about new years’ resolutions. Plans for self-improvement and such. I am not into that either because I like me the way I am.

Today I am thinking about travel, where I have been, and where I would like to go. I want to go just about everywhere on the planet, but I know I will probably never get to most of it. I may even miss whole continents entirely. I have only been to four of the seven, and only seen two of our five oceans. The world is huge but I don’t want to leave it. Space travel is not for me.

Flying however, to get from here to wherever, is quite acceptable. Yet, I haven’t traveled for a holiday celebration since Thanksgiving 2021, and I haven’t traveled for Christmas in many years. Instead of joining in the airport festivities I watch it on the news. I don’t have the statistics, but this year, harsh weather (not bad weather, because there is no such thing as bad weather; it is just weather until you make a personal decision about how it affects you) has hindered travelers all over the country, grounding flights, and spoiling plans for get-togethers.

Southwest Airlines had a particularly rough week, unable to fulfill their commitments and stranding thousands of passengers in dozens of airports, creating exponential backups that nobody could help with. Even employees could not get through on the phone to let the airline know they could not get through the snow to get to the airports to work. Such a mess.

Glad I wasn’t part of that.

But, as the armchair quarterback of all debacles, watching through the safety of my TV set I scrutinize the problem to find solutions. With the benefit of hindsight, I am able to see everything that went wrong with the play, and I think I know how to get the ball into the endzone and then get it kicked cleanly through the goalposts to deliver a stellar performance and win the game.

Let’s look at the big problems first.

Snow and blizzard like conditions. Can’t fix that. Too bad.

Lots of people all wanting to go to the same places all at the same time. Well, they should know better, but they are human. We will come back to them in a few minutes.

Carry-on luggage. There is way too much of it. You need to check it.

But, Mike, haven’t you heard about all the checked luggage that showed up without their passengers? Isn’t that part of the problem?

Maybe. You could look at the glass half empty if you want, but if you paid for your luggage to make the trip and it did, that is squarely one less thing to complain about.

But how does that happen? Are there just planes full of luggage and no passengers?

No, there are just a lot of planes going the same places the luggage is. Just because you paid Southwest to carry it, doesn’t mean that they did. This should be obvious now. Baggage handlers are directing luggage to their destinations no matter what plane the passenger is on. When it gets to the destination airport the receiving handler doesn’t care what plane it came from, and in the great unseen machinery that is the luggage belt in the bowels of your airport, optical character readers are directing that luggage onto their respective racks and delivering it to the airline that placed it in the system. So when you tell Southwest “I want my luggage to get to Denver because I plan to go there with it,” by golly, it is going to Denver come hell or high water, whether you get on the plane or not. Even when your plane isn’t moving away from the terminal and onto a runway, baggage handlers don’t care. Their mission is to get that luggage to Denver. So, if that Southwest flight isn’t moving any time soon, no worries, baggage handlers have you covered. There are other planes run by other companies that are going to Denver, so they just pop your stuff onto one of those planes instead.

Why? Because they have tons of room in the belly of planes. They are not filling up the cargo holds because they have made it cost prohibitive to pay fees for baggage handling and then force people to resort to carry-on. So when say, a United or American or Delta flight is heading out and has lots of room for luggage, sure, what the hell, bring it on, we get paid by the pound and we have tons of room, Southwest is good for it. Who cares if it gets there early? Nobody is going to complain about that.

It is really a beautiful system. Shame so many people are whining about it.

But luggage does get lost and stolen. I myself, had the misfortune of losing my luggage years ago, when I was 20, on a flight from Detroit to Orlando via Atlantic City. That was not the most direct route, but it was the cheapest I could get in 1984, probably around $80. I got home to Orlando, but my luggage never did. I mean NEVER! I lost all my clothes. I really do mean all of them, too, because at the time I could fit everything I owned into a duffel bag, which was only about three pairs of jeans, ten shirts, and undergarments. I didn’t lose anything truly valuable, but I did have to wear the same clothes for a couple weeks until I got paid and was able to buy new threads. I was really lucky that the airline (a budget company I do not recall the name of) reimbursed me $500! I got more new clothes, went out to dinner, and paid the rent early. That was the airline’s policy and I was not about to argue with it.

Some airlines now reimburse up to $3,800 for lost luggage, based on whatever rules they apply to your claim. But nobody really wants to lose their luggage. And when it gets where it is supposed to go it can be stolen, and sometimes is.

I have traveled extensively and I can not recall a single domestic US flight where I had to present proof to grab my luggage off the carousel and walk away. Nobody checks. Not so in some foreign countries, like China, Venezuela, and Peru. They lock it down. You better have that ticket stub or it’s “No luggage for you!” and they mean it. In Caracas, on the flight home, they had a baggage service for outbound fliers where they would shrinkwrap your bags for you before it went into the system, presumably to prevent theft by baggage handlers, and to ensure customs agents that the bag had not been tampered with since presenting it for departure. So, if there is contraband in your bag, it is because you put it there.

Whether or not an airline reimburses you for lost luggage, it goes somewhere. I contend that it is a huge scam. There is a retail store in Scottsboro, Alabama that collects everything lost and sells it. They claim that less than 3 in every 10,000 bags that are lost are truly orphaned. With the massive amount of inventory they have it looks like airlines are losing millions of bags. Hence the reason for the popularity of carry-on.

While there are lots of reasons why a bag may get lost and not be reunited with its rightful owner, and that it may otherwise end up on a trash heap, it saddens me to know that somebody lost something they might really want and will never, ever see it again, unless they find it here and buy it back. It is like a yard sale for stolen goods. Kind of. I know it makes sense but it just doesn’t sit right with me. I won't buy anything from this place.

If you want to find your luggage or any other valuable item that you may possibly be separated from, you can always invest $25 or so in a GPS tracker and hide it inside.

With safeguards like GPS tracking and the 99.997% probability that you will always get your bags back, I say, roll the dice and check it. I only lost luggage once and it paid off. If it happens again, well, new wardrobe, here I come.

Besides, who wants to haul all their stuff on and off the airplane? I don’t. That’s why we have skycaps. Tip those guys, get your boarding pass, and go. Make your life easy.

Another thing you can do is to not travel during the holidays. At all. Just don’t do it.

Flag on the play, Mike. All our relatives only get to see eachother once a year.

But do they want to see you? Are you really all that? Come on!

Offsides! Ten yard penalty.

Okay fine. Be that way. Maybe they do want to see you. But does it have to be during a major holiday with a probability of harsh weather? This is what jams everything up. Everybody wanting to do everything in the same place at the same time. Just like rush hour commutes.

I have been an advocate for 24/7 business for years. Instead of having everybody trying to get to work between 7:00 and 9:00 AM five days a week, if we had everything open 24 hours all the time, work hours could stagger, we could employ three times more people, traffic jams would decline, and everyone would have time to see more matinee theatrical acts, like in Las Vegas.

But the real deterrent to get people to stop traveling so much is to raise ticket prices.

Offensive holding! Illegal motion! Twenty yards!

I don’t care, it was worth it. Charging extra for bags doesn’t work. People still travel, checked bags or not. But does everybody traveling really need to travel? The short answer is no. Travel is not always a necessity. It is basically a desire.

We go places because we want to. Airline travel is already expensive, however, if it were more cost prohibitive we could end up with less flights, and less congestion at airports. That is, IF, people refuse to pay high prices. But they won’t. People are stubborn. If every ticket price doubled tomorrow, almost nobody would change their plans for anything. They would just pay it. I know I would. If I want to go somewhere, I go.

So, I know you were hoping that I would have some real solutions and help bring home a trophy here, but with everybody wanting to do all the same things at the same time, over and over again, it is just not going to happen. When people keep moving no matter how inclement the weather, and won’t budge an inch, the game goes into overtime and everyone loses.

Happy travels! Welcome to 2023.

This just in from a couple of veterans of the travel gridiron:

Donye: Well, this Rembis Report was just a mess, wasn't it?

Elon: You've got that right, Donye. The field was atrocious. Mud everywhere, but all in all, still some great plays.

Donye: Are you kidding? He was getting called out every paragraph. Errors all over the place. And that craziness about raising prices? Who would vote for that?

Elon: I don't know. I think he has a point.

Donye: Yeah, his fat head has a point. But, you're right, nobody want to fly coach anyway. They should just make all the seats business class, that way, luggage is included in the ticket price.

Elon: That is practically what he just said.

Donye: Exactly. They should refurbish all the planes. Make the seats bigger. Start serving food again. The way they used to in the 1980's. We had choices. Full menus. Free drinks. I owned an airline back then. Top of the line. Made a ton of money. It was beautiful.

Elon: Do you even hear yourself right now?

Donye: Elon, buddy, that's all I hear.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives before Elon trashes them all. But don't worry, if that happens, I will transfer them all to a new archive sometime soon. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.