MINNEAPOLIS — Sun Country, an airline that used to give free hot dogs on every flight, now charges a special fee for booking online. Round trip, it’s $44.
Apparently, people just discovered this in the past few weeks. I know I missed it, probably because booking flights these days involves getting nickled, dimed, quartered and half-dollared to death, and your eyes just glaze over. Why is my $97 flight now $141? Well, I’d better leap on it, because it’ll be more tomorrow.
I can’t think of any other industry that can get away with this. It’s like finding an “Oral Telecommunication Convenience Charge” of $50 tacked onto your restaurant bill because you made a reservation by phone.
You can avoid the charge by making the reservation in person, like it’s 1967. Let’s walk up to the counter and buy an airline ticket with a Diner’s Club card! They probably let you smoke while you do it.
But explain why there’s no charge for dealing with someone who has to be paid to show up, while making the reservation online, which involves zero humans, costs extra.
I understand charging for select seats, because it’s better to be up front than stuck in the back by the toilets. You get off the plane faster, so you can wait longer for your luggage. When you’re in Seat 46F, there’s a chance they’re out of the meal you want, and you get the Lukewarm Slurry of Mushed Vegetables.
There are two possible explanations for a $44 round-trip ticket charge.
Possible reason No. 1: The Sun Country computers are powered by treadmills, each of which has a recently retired NBA player who is accustomed to a high salary, and they all wear shoes with soles covered in gold leaf, which wears away quite quickly.
Once the reservation is made, it is printed out on a bolt of silk with ink hand-squeezed from endangered squid. This is rolled up and handed to a courier who boards a private jet powered by distilled whale oil, and he flies to Switzerland, where an aged wise man who is kept alive by an expensive cocktail of rare drugs unrolls the bolt and notes that you have not selected a seat. The reservation is placed in a huge particle accelerator and bombarded with neutrinos, and if the number of neutrinos is an odd number, you are given the middle seat.
The results are then engraved by laser on a slab of old-growth redwood, which is entrusted to a team of sled dogs wearing Gucci booties and Chanel collars; they take it back to the airport, where it is flown to the Sun Country HQ and entered into the computer by a team of plumbers, but since it’s on the weekend, their rates are double.
An additional $4 is added to pay for development of the Sun Country phone app, which in the future will automatically debit your bank account 37 cents when you look at its icon.
Possible reason No. 2: They charge you this fee because they can.
You looked at the cost of the flight and thought, “Well, that’s not ruinously expensive, and even though I know there’ll be a fee here and there for things like ‘bags’ and ‘oxygen’ and ‘pilot debarking interaction’ (you can say “Thanks” for the flight for free, but “You’re welcome” is a buck-fifty) you still have the original base price in your head.
What amazes me, because I am still a guileless and naïve man who maintains a remnant of institutional trust: You don’t get charged for declining travel insurance.
I know, I know: Don’t give them ideas.
