Merry Christmas and welcome back to another round of Travel Tip Tuesday. All alliteration aside this will be a little different than the past few iterations which were very gear heavy. I love gear as much as the next guy and with Christmas here hopefully you found some heartfelt and useful gifts for your loved ones. But this week’s travel tip is about the Christmas Spirit.
I’m finishing up a four day trip and I’m very excited to be home with my family, even if only for a about 15 hours over Christmas. On this four day trip I was flying the last flight of the night from Atlanta to Charleston. Everything was moving on schedule and we were ready to push around 11:30 at night.
Right before we started our push, the captain and I saw someone doing that very familiar “I can’t believe I missed my flight” dance at the gate. We sent a message to the gate agent and told her to bring the jet bridge back and put the delay on us.
For those of you not familiar, everyone at the airline has a job to do in order to get flights out on time, and often times those metrics are tied to performance pay. So by us (the pilots) saying to put the delay on us, we were relieving the gate agent of feeling like she might be penalized for the aircraft going out late.
The jet bridge was brought back, the three passengers (two more made it up breathless in the time it took to get the jet bridge hooked up and the door opened) all made it on the aircraft and we’re extremely grateful.
What surprised me was the response from our flight attendants and one particular passenger in first class. The flight attendants were annoyed that they had to repeat their safety briefing over again. (The aircraft I fly kicks it old school without screens so the flight attendants actually talk and demonstrate). The first class passenger scoffed loud enough for me to hear from the open cockpit door and said “I can’t believe we are letting them on” I assured him that we would still be on time in Charleston
The flight proceeded without incident, we arrived at our gate two minutes ahead of schedule, and we got three more people to their destination for Christmas than we otherwise would have.
All it took for us to make these people’s Christmas as little better was a little bit of attention to recognize the situation, and a little bit of empathy to make the right call. One of the best things you can travel with all year round is a little bit of Christmas spirit.
Whether it is helping someone fold up their stroller in the jetway, giving up your seat in a busy terminal gate, helping someone get a bag in the overhead, or just having an overall cheerful attitude in what can be a stressful situation, we can all use a little more Christmas spirit in our travel experiences. A little bit of empathy and compassion will help all of us on our journey towards Serenity through Sweat.
Thanks for joining me for Travel Tip Tuesday, Merry Christmas, and stay sweaty my friends.
