Interview with Cranky Concierge Owner – Job Shadow
I was contacted by this site so they could learn more about what it means to be an air travel assistant. It was a lengthy interview and they published it verbatim.
Airline to offer baby-free ‘quiet zone’ – NBCNews.com
In a story about child-free sections on airplanes, I was able to chime in with some personal experience.
In the Trenches: A Successful Vacation – Intuit Small Business Blog
My long-awaited vacation came and went and the business continued on successfully. I was thrilled.
6 comments on “Cranky on the Web (September 24 – 28)”
Your quiet zone comment was so true about parents attending to their children. When in public during my childhood days children were taught to behave or else. We did not run around wild making noise and annoying everyone else.
Now a days to many parents are ignoring their children in public and letting them run wild making nose and annoying everyone else. It’s like if the child isn’t on top of them annoying them, they don’t care what those kids do.
A baby is different then an older child since you can say don’t cry all you want and they still will. But a parent who is trying to calm them down will not get the ‘looks’ from those around them.
It’s sad when you see a stranger trying to quiet a child down while their parents just act like nothing their child is doing is wrong.
Brett,
Are you no longer writing for CNN? If not, why such a short run?
Technically, I can still write for CNN but the whole thing kind of fell apart. They lost some of their editorial staff and were constantly insanely busy. It got to the point where they said, “if you have an idea, just pitch it to us.” So it was no longer going to be a regular column. I ramped up with Conde Nast and decided that it was best for us to just go our separate ways. Still, if a good story for CNN pops up, I can still pitch and it might go live.
Would it really be that hard for airlines to have family or children seating? The old days of smoking sections really is a good analogy since it could work the same way. Since most airlines let families with small children board first put them in the back, problem solved, right? When booking a flight the airline could just say, last 5 rows are “child friendly” or something like that.
As for seating a family together, I used to have no issues with changing seats so a family can be seated together. Several times Flight Attendants have put me in first class for offering. The problem is today airlines are selling the aisle seats for a premium and first is always full with those with a higher status than me. I’m not going to volunteer my aisle seat or economy plus seat for a middle seat just so a family can sit together. The airlines created the problem for families when they sliced and diced coach seating up into it’s various premiums. Why not just add another section and call it done.
A – It’s one thing to designate an area as child-friendly and a different thing to ban kids from sitting in the area. The former is more like smoking sections because anybody could choose to sit anywhere on the airplane – it would just be a different environment. In the latter, you are banning a certain group from sitting in an area entirely.
The problem is that people who don’t want to be near kids are more likely to pay than those who have kids, I think, so you have to do it as the latter.
It would be a marvelous prayer answered for there to be a sealed off section for babies/toddlers parents at the back of each airplane. Reserve the back six rows, give them disney movies to watch, a changing table in the lavatory, extra leg room, toddler meals — and a plexiglass sliding door so that no crying or other loud noise would affect any of the adults on the plane.
Of course, I also dream of passengers getting 100% fresh oxygen in the cabin like the pilots do, instead of the 50% (?) recycled stale air that so generously passes around everyone’s sick germs!