I was despaired this holiday season to witness the new low that has arrived at our airports and how American travel companies are participating in their own demise and demonization.
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As a lifelong traveler, I was despaired this holiday season to witness the new low that has arrived at our airports and how American travel companies are participating in their own demise and demonization.

Countless articles have been written about how the glamour has gone out of travel. The days when one dressed up to board a plane or chatted with cabin mates over Champagne have been replaced with mobs of people in their track suits eating fast food out of paper bags. I've accepted that air travel has become mass transit. My consolation: the number of airline passengers traveling globally has grown from 108 million in 1960 to 2.25 billion in 2007, so quantity wins out over quality. After all, the benefit of more people seeing the world outweighs the loss of cachet.

Of course, 9/11 and the new security controls degraded the passenger process further. There is no dignity in shuffling around in your socks in front of strangers while laying out your toiletry items for all to see. But at least the security gauntlet is one that has to be run by all, and is not arbitrarily meted out by disgruntled airline employees.

Unfortunately, what I experienced last week added injustice to indignity. For the past four years, my family and I have traveled after Christmas from New York to Salt Lake City for a week of skiing. We send our ski clothes ahead so we can avoid the long lines at check-in and travel only with carry-on. (Yes, convenience trumps fashion.) This year, however, after we printed our boarding passes at the self-service check-in kiosks, a Delta agent stopped us before we could proceed to security.

"You have to check those bags," he said, motioning to our roller bags. We pointed out that the bags are designed to fit in the overhead bin and we always travel with them. "Well, if they don't fit in this square, you have to check them," he said. There was a board painted with measurements 22 inches by 14 inches. We placed our luggage against the measurements; all of them fit within the painted outlines but two extended slightly over the edge of the base. "Those will have to be checked."

Another family arrived pulling similar bags. "You have to check all of those," the man commanded. He was now joined by a grimacing female cohort, who nodded. "But we just bought them at Macy's and were told that they were regulation," said the father in the group. The Delta enforcer shook his head, no. "Unless you can zip them to be narrower, you have to check them."

It was clear that if we were going to make our flight, we would have to follow his edict, but as my husband went to check in the two bags, I watched as some with larger bags were waved through and others weren't. On December 5, 2008 Delta instituted bag fees of $15 for the first bag and $25 for the second checked bag. Could this be why the employees were suddenly getting so strict about size limits? Daniel LeSieur and his wife from Portland were also sent to wait in the long line to check bags, even though they had carried the same ones on board on their flight East. The additional cost: $150. "It's outrageous," LeSieur said. "These bags fit overhead but they can now make money from telling me no."

Keith Rang, who was on his way up to Buffalo for his bachelor party (He's a Bills fan), worried about missing his flight and had a duffel bag. He tried to pile on enough sweaters and shirts from his bag so that he could shrink it down to fit in the luggage lines. Despite being amused at his labor of layering, the agents still made him check it.

A gentleman flying to Spain, who also had traveled with his suitcase as carry-on coming over the Atlantic, was forced to check his bag and when he returned with a camera around his neck and a hanging passport pouch, in addition to his knapsack, was told that he couldn't have two personal items. As soon as I began taking names and snapping pictures, the enforcer called over security. "Are you traveling today?" he asked me. "Yes, my husband is checking a bag." He asked a friend of the man headed to Spain, who was challenging the agent, to leave the terminal if he wasn't traveling. "I can be inside if I want," he said. "No," security threatened. "You must step outside." Why? Because he was pointing out Delta's bag scam to other passengers?

When we finally did pass through security and got to the gate, we found ourselves surrounded by passengers with bags much larger than those we had checked. They had come through a different entrance. I have been reading Margaret Atwood's wonderful meditation on debt, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. One of her central tenets is that a system of debt and credit rely on "our sense of fairness." She notes that even in chimpanzee societies, fair play must exist.

I may have felt that the security guy stifling free speech was an anti-democratic gesture, but at a more basic, animal level, I was outraged at the unfairness of rules applying to me but not to others. As Atwood remarks, "If fairness is completely lacking, the members of the chimpanzee group will rebel; at the very least, they're unlikely to join in a group hunt next time." That's how we are hard-wired, but my saga wasn't over.

After we collected our bags in Salt Lake, we arrived at the Hertz car rental desk to be told that our pre-paid reservation wouldn't be honored. "We're out of cars," the manager told us. But we had a confirmation number, even a voucher, showing that we had paid in full for a four-wheel drive. "We don't have any cars," the manager repeated, and then motioned to the man behind us in line, who was holding his Hertz Gold card. He looked at his confirmation number and handed the man a pair of car keys. "Hey," a man down the desk from us shouted. "You said that you had no more cars. I paid in July." Yes, I thought, but your money is not quite as golden as that man's. Cajoling and complaining led to another set of car keys materializing for us, but then the manager pulled out a 'Closed' sign. Dozens of people in line -- and more still arriving on flights -- had no cars, not even anyone to complain to. Did Hertz or Delta management care that they are actively discouraging travel just as the industry is facing its steepest predicted decline in a decade? They don't seem to.

I have spent more than a decade trying to inspire people to travel the world, and now I cannot blame many for just wanting to stay home.

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