Air Travel

My husband, David, and I thought we were pretty savvy travelers. On an August ’07 trip (Aug. ’08, pg. 52), we packed a few things in each other’s bags, double-checked the destination tags the airlines put on our checked bags, locked the bags with our TSA locks and had our 3-1-1 baggies present and accounted for, but we still ended up in hot water when our bags did the Charles de Gaulle shuffle and failed to arrive in St. Petersburg, Russia. Our entire concept of carry-on bags changed in mere minutes.

The website www.seatguru.com lets you see the seat layouts and dimensions (with comments) for each airline’s planes. I didn’t see a table listing the dimensions; you have to look it up plane by plane for each airline.

My wife and I, both experienced world travelers, transferred through the Frankfurt, Germany, airport en route from Los Angeles to Lithuania and back in July ’08. We found landing at Terminal 1 and transferring to Terminal 2 (and vice versa) extremely difficult to accomplish.

There was construction going on in much of the area, and though my wife speaks German and could read all the signs (some of which were in English), they were confusing and not adequate. In addition, the distance between terminals was enormous.

Nine months out, on Dec. 6, 2006, my wife and I called US Airways directly and purchased three tickets for a Sept. 8, 2007, flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Philadelphia and on to Venice, Italy, with return from Rome on Sept. 24. For the three of us we paid $5,521 for full-fare economy-class tickets, then upgraded to business class using frequent-flyer points.

My wife and I took an almost 3-week-long tour to Egypt and Jordan with Vantage Deluxe World Travel, Jan. 20-Feb. 8, 2008, at a cost of $10,248 for two, including round-trip airfare from Washington, D.C., to Cairo.

This was advertised as a 5-star trip. It involved two cruises, one on the Nile and the other on Lake Nasser.

I’d say the Nile ship, Crown Empress, was 3-star, not 5-star. This was confirmed by walking through other ships, as they were tied up one next to another; some were obviously better.

I was on a United Airlines flight from Washington Dulles to Frankfurt, Germany, in June ’07 when the call came out for medical personnel to identify themselves. A passenger had fainted and fallen and remained unconscious.

A neurologist on board was unable to directly assist the patient since she did not have her medical license with her. Another doctor and I (an R.N.) treated the passenger, taking vital signs and checking her pupils for reactivity.

Tourism in Bali, Indonesia, continues to make strides toward normalcy, but there are still peaks and valleys with bookings.

My family and I had boarded a Virgin Atlantic plane for a flight from London to Nairobi on Dec. 26, 2007.

William Lewis of Johns Island, South Carolina, and his wife missed their US Airways flight out of Los Angeles after their Thai Airways flight arrived late from Bangkok. William told ITN that they still would have caught their flight to Charleston if their luggage had not taken so long to unload because the “Priority” tags had been ripped off of all four bags. (The tags went missing on their outbound Thai Air flight as well.)

by Nancy Tardy, Henderson, NV