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Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

> Try flying Lufthansa (or one of their half dozen subsidiaries created almost entirely to give worse service) anywhere inside of europe. Everything is a money grab and the service and boarding are terrible.

FWIW, I just took such a flight and didn't notice anything that compares unfavorably to a domestic U.S. airline. (To be clear, it certainly wasn't better either.) Is there anything specific you can point to?

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Every drink is for sale, even coffee. They aggressively use the bag sizer and try to take bags away at the gate, under the ruse that their tiny Airbus overhead bins cannot fit them (they can).

Just put it in the hold. I can’t stand waiting for the cheapskate to find somewhere to put their 45kg “rucksack” in the over head bins just to save a tenner.

Don't they charge you even more to check a bag?

It’s nice that $10 is trivial to you but it isn’t to everyone. Being cheap and being poor are different.

"Put it in the hold" is a decent argument for point-to-point flights, or when you do gate checking. Otherwise it's a crap-shoot whether your stuff makes it (which can end a two-day business trip before it begins), what shape it will be in, and how long you'll have to wait. As soon as you have a connection, all bets are off.

How long you'll have to wait is mostly a function not of the airline, but of the arrival airport and the competence of the handling company.

The airlines deserve no money above the price of a ticket. The way i see it the hold comes free with the rest of the plane. I see no reason why i need to pay another 40 pounds to bring a case, so i will shamelessly abuse my allowance. (if it was a reasonable amount like a tenner, that would be a different story, as it stands it's a cash grab)

Checked luggage is lost luggage, in my experience. I think I've only checked maybe two or three bags in the past 20 years (after two lost-luggage incidents prompted me to switch to a carry-on-only packing regimen), and then only because I needed to transport liquids in excess of the in-cabin allowance.

I also like to leave the airport after my plane arrives, not stand around a conveyor belt for some unguessable amount of time.

But I get your frustration; I'm the kind of person who barely breaks stride out of the aisle and into my row as I sling my bag up into the bin. It makes me want to scream when someone is standing there in the aisle for 30+ seconds, holding up the boarding process.

Then again, the airlines are to blame as well, most of them having terribly inefficient boarding processes.

Huh. None of that happened on either of my Lufthansa flights between Frankfurt and Berlin last week. YMMV, I guess.

I saw the baggage dance bit before a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt (from Seattle) in October, and before the connecting flight to Sarajevo.

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