As a keen cyclist and travel website owner (turning into frequent blogger card holder too), I was interested to read this CNN article suggested to me by Travelrants (via Twitter) about how customer Carl Larson blogged on the Bike Transportation Alliance website about being charged $50 to carry his foldable bike on the U.S. carrier Jet Blue, and then managed to get them to change their policy and refund his money after his blog post was picked up by another cycling blog - bikeportland. His post then made its way to a site called The Consumerist, which incidentally I was on earlier on today when I was looking up the Times article about reasons not to fly Ryanair (in order to reply with 20 reasons why you should fly with Ryanair.
Now speaking of airlines and blogging, we know that Ryanair have made an outburst about ‘lunatic bloggers‘, but Ryanair have always thrived on being antagonistic towards anyone who can get them a headline or two, so their strategy is going to buck the trend a little. Jetblue seem to have a commercial model which is much more similar to Easyjet, so it will be interesting to see how stories evolve about The Big Orange and other low cost carriers responding to blogs.
Meanwhile, I think that my own two nightmares with carrying bikes on plans pre-dated the social media revolution. My first was on a Thomsonfly flight to Malaga from Coventry in February 2006, where the wheel got dented, I think because it was put on the standard luggage reclaim belt at Malaga airport. It wouldn’t have been worth pursuing the airline for the cost of one wheel, and fortunately my hotel was just 100 yards from a bike shop so I was able to get going again fairly quickly.
After that experience, I got a hard case for bike the next time for a flight to Geneva with Easyjet in Otctober 2006. On the return journey from Basel, the case itself was damaged. What looked like just a missing wheel turned out to be a crack in the outer casing, writing off the whole box. It took 6 weeks for Easyjet to admit liability, and even when they did, they only repeated the phrase (still, I believe used today), that “bikes and aircraft don’t mix”. I knew they wouldn’t cover the bike, and had separate cover for that, and thought things would be sorted when it turned out that my travel insurance, which was one of the features of the American Express Platinum Card, did indeed cover me for the box. But they then argued that I needed a statement from the airline within 48 hours of arrival - something that it wasn’t possible to get in these circumstances. After numerous follow up emails and phone calls, I got a cheque for the full value of the damaged box, but only under the proviso that it “would not set a precedent for future claims.”
By then, I had already lost all faith in American Express’ customer service and cancelled my card. I have not even considered taking my bike on a plane since.
Maybe next time I have a travel related problem with an airline, I will be abke to make a bit more noise, knowing there is a much greater chance of being listened to - unless, as I said in my last article, I happen to be flying at Michael O’Leary’s pleasure!