AirTran travel fail

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the more flying I do, the more annoyed with it I get. This weekend was no exception.

Seriously, if you’re flying AirTran out of LAS (Las Vegas) and either haven’t done online check-in the night before or have bags to check, make sure you show up at the airport at least 3 hours before your flight. 4 hours would probably be better.

My 3 day excursion to Vegas was a lot of fun until it came time to leave. Not in a “sad to leave fun Vegas” sort of way, but in a painful “3 hour wait in line to check in at the airport for a flight that’s delayed 2 hours” kind of way. AirTran has no check-in kiosks at their desk, so you’re back in the 80s waiting in line to check in. If you’re checking luggage, you have to wait in line anyway. It’s a pretty long line. The only reason I didn’t miss my flight out of Vegas was because the in-bound flight was delayed. To be fair, I believe the Las Vegas airport has some generic check-in kiosks that I could have used, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway with the delayed flight. I still ended up missing the connecting flight back to CHS, but fortunately the delay was caused by mechanical problems with the plane so AirTran put me up in a hotel in ATL to wait for the flight out the next day.

Leaving ATL was only a little less painful. Between two gate changes and the plane the flight crew was on being delayed by weather, my flight was only about an hour late getting off the ground. I think I finally made it into Charleston about 14 hours after I was supposed to have arrived.

Ugh. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my old age, but I’m really starting to dislike flying. A lot.