Americans get ready to pack lighter for trips to Europe

[Evan]

I'm really disappointed, though I liked my June/July trip with BA.

To me, that means that I'll look to some other airline for my annual trip to California in in 2010. Sure, until then all of major airlines might have followed suit, but I won't easily forgive and forget who started it. And instead of running around LHR T5, I'll spare me at least two hours total time on a nonstop flight FRA-LAX. My portable DVD player is not that heavy, or maybe DLH switches more flights to A340-600's with in-seat personal entertainment...

ToM

Which raises another point: Which would you rather give up? The second bag and the meal or the in-flight entertainment? I don't have the information, but I assume the airlines pay a pretty sum to the media/entertainment industry for these services. Eliminating them would probably save them a bundle.

I used to fly Lufthansa and BA to Berlin and Prague. Now I fly on Delta's direct 767 service. There is no endless layover at Frankfurt or baggage filter/redundant second security queue at Heathrow involved, no terminal 5 nightmares. There is also no personal seat-back video entertainment. My in-flight entertainment consists of a good book and/or my mp3 player. I get a lot of reading done on airplanes. Even when I have the screen there, I usually turn it off. But I'm not the average media junkie either.

How about a poll for this: checked baggage allowance (and less to carry-on) and meals vs IFE?

[EconomyClass]

http://www.seatguru.com

http://www.airlinequality.com/

Not sure where the policies on baggage were, but I did get the interesting insight that few prominent American companies exceed 3 stars. I suppose I might have guessed that. I suppose also I'll guess that flights on 5 star airlines either depart from places a long ways off or don't land where I would want to land.

[paulc]

I have always found it strange that on United you can check in 2 bags of 23 kg for free yet you get hit for excess baggage if your 1 bag is over 24kg. Mine was 6 kg over and they wanted some $300 so it was much cheaper to buy a small case and off load some of my stuff.