Today Spirit Airlines is starting non-stop flights from Ft. Lauderdale to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. In celebration of the new service, fares today (flight leaves at 8:55 pm, so you still have time) and tomorrow are $9.

Though if you want to reserve an aisle or window seat, you'll have to pay $10 more. (See below.)

> Discuss this entry

Yes, it now costs to reserve a seat when flying Spirit.

And while discouraging, this move does finally put out there in the open what we all knew: some seats are more valuable than others.

Middle seats are going for $5, window and aisle seats for $10, and exit row seats for $15.

Which seems logical, except that not all window seats are created equal. There are window seats over the wing and there are window seats from which you can actually see something. For those of us who love to watch where we're going, these latter are much more desirable.

Even aisle and middle seats divide into good and not so, the first being toward the front of the plane (now that passengers will be taking more time to remove from the overhead bins the overstuffed bags they didn't want to pay to be checked).

So don't think these additional costs are over yet. They've only just begun.

> Discuss this entry

So I guess you've all heard about American Airlines charging $15 for the first checked bag on domestic flights (beginning with tickets purchased on or after June 15).

While bringing in more money to the airline, this fee will create even more of a mess at airports, as people seach for bills - or worse, credit cards - to give to whom? The skycaps? The automated check-in systems? And wait and see how many frugal flyers try to squeeze oversized bags into the overhead compartments, holding up boarding even longer. Is this what American wants?

But I don't want to pick on them. There are still a lot of things they can charge us for. Magazines, paperbacks, headphones, sandwiches we now have to lug on because we know we won't get fed, jackets, belts, shoes, socks, hearing aids, dental fillings. Don't put it past them. Clearly, to them we're all just extra baggage.

> Discuss this entry

"Cookies!" Elaine on Seinfeld famously announced on trying to fly first class. "They have cookies up here!"

But that was the '90s. Now they have celebrity chefs. Charlie Trotter has teamed with United, and Miami's Michelle Bernstein with American, to produce gourmet meals for first class passengers on international flights.

This is wonderful news to - what - 5% of the population? We sad sacks back in coach are left with whatever scraps the airlines deem suitable for our miserable existence.

But there's a bright side to this injustice. Flying coach - hungry, constricted, painfully aware of economic divides - we experience for perhaps the only time in our lives how much of the world lives vis a vis the United States. It is an invaluable lesson in global realities - our sole chance to approximate what it's like to live in a developing country.

> Discuss this entry