Last year, when Delta stranded me for three days in Seoul, South Korea and then refused to spring for a room in NYC after they put me on a KAL flight that took me there instead of to Atlanta and then to Tampa, I should have realized that Delta was telling me they didn’t want me as a customer. That was on a $3000+ business-class ticket, too! And other airlines have stranded me, sent my luggage to much nicer destinations than the ones I went to, and generally made it clear that I was an imposition, not a valued customer. Free miles? A chimera. Continental employees assured me that the miles from a trip to New Delhi, India, would show in my account, but they never have. And so on.

Plus aircraft interiors are dirty half the time, and the cabin attendents get a little surlier and less helpful every year.

I stopped flying for vacations and other “pleasure” travel several years ago. Now I’m cutting my business travel back as much as I can.

So far this year I’ve turned down trips to India, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Raleigh, NC, and New York, among others. I’ve made only two (domestic) airline trips this year and only have two more (both domestic) scheduled, which is way down from my previous business travel schedule of 12 (or more) round-trip flights per year.

Chances are, I’ll still make between five and six (unavoidable) business trips per year in the forseeable future. I doubt that the airlines will miss me. Almost every flight I’ve been on in the last two years was full-to-bursting, and I hear that most airlines are cutting flights, not adding them.

The airlines — along with their friends at the Transportation Security Administration — have made it clear that they do not want me to fly. So I will do my best to please them — by not flying any more than absolutely necessary.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.