One of the challenges of moving to a new city or starting a new job is figuring out if your old airline loyalties are worth maintaining. So in the wake of resigning from my former employment and moving from Minneapolis to Austin, I’ve been questioning things.
In Minneapolis, it made sense to fly Delta. There were a lot of Delta flights, because MSP’s a Delta hub, and at least for the last couple years they counted connections as additional flights when tallying up whether or not I’d get a free checked bag the next year, so going through Atlanta became a positive in more ways than just getting access to Chick-fil-a, and going through Salt Lake became a positive in more ways than just feeling like I was in a 1996 NBA video game (that’s a typeface joke, not a Utah Jazz joke, which explains why you’re either howling or confused). Southwest was also in Minneapolis, in the itty bitty other terminal, so there was an alternative option that was actually different if I needed different because of cost or timing, making the two strong compliments.
Southwest is here in Austin as well, with about an equal presence (by my impression) to the big three. But there’s little advantage for me in being loyal to Southwest, because everyone gets free checked bags with them, and the “perk” of accumulating a lot of miles is that you have to get on the plane earlier (this is backwards). And while I’m happy to fly Southwest a good amount, it’d be nice to have points or a free checked bag with another airline. I use an old-school safety razor because my neck evidently doesn’t work with the modern-day ones they allow on planes, which makes the checked bag pretty nice, and Southwest doesn’t fly into O’Hare, which is a lot closer to my hometown back in Illinois than Midway.
Which is all a long way of saying I’m at the point of wanting to compare Delta with its alternatives. And since United is off the board for the next few years because of an incident at the Roanoke airport last October that I don’t want to rehash right now (thank you again to that police officer for seeing things my way), it really means I’m just comparing Delta to American Airlines. So this week, for the first time in quite a while, I flew American.
Before I tell you about my experience, though, let me run down how I feel about Delta. In a word, this would be “good,” but in more words, I like the little cookies they give you with the in-flight beverage service and I like that if you’ve connected through Atlanta and Salt Lake enough times, you get upgraded to Comfort Plus (free beer) or First Class (even better cookie) with some regularity.
With that background, you can imagine my elation when I discovered American gives you the exact same cookies as Delta. Biscoff or whatever they’re named (I call them “happy cookies”). Which in my very simple brain and heart makes the two airlines the same, especially since I haven’t flown enough miles with American nor figured out how to get into my online account with them (my dad set me up as a frequent flier back around 2000, when I was five, so the password doesn’t exist which makes the ‘forgot password’ link quite useless) so I have no idea how their rewards program works.
In some ways, this could be seen as a bad thing: I now will feel obligated to look at both airlines’ prices (in addition to Southwest) when booking flights to next year’s NIT Final Four. But on the positive side, it gives me another non-United option with the added benefit of guaranteed happy cookies.
The sky is full of surprises.
