The Joys of Standby

Since moving back to the US, I’ve visited Japan three times. I’m able to do this on my fairly meager salary for a number of reasons, but a pretty big one is the fact that I always fly standby. My aunt and uncle work for Delta airlines, and through them I’m able to get cheap standby tickets for about $600 – a normal ticket tends to run at least twice that.

If you’re unfamiliar with what a standby ticket is, it essentially means that you get on the plane as long as there are open seats after all of the regular-paying customers have boarded. Normally this isn’t a problem, and there are almost always seats open in business or first class, so for $600 you get a fully reclining chair to sleep in, food that is actually edible (and good, even), and all of the other amenities that are normally reserved for people of actual import. And let me say, once you’ve flown first class, it is hard to go back to traveling like a mere peasant, down in the cramped quarters of economy.

This sounds pretty excellent, right? Of course, there is that tiny catch – the part about only getting on the plane as long as there are open seats. Technically, this can make travel a bit tricky – what happens if you request certain days off from work, but don’t get on your return flight? Then you need to request another day (or more) at the last second, you need to pay for an additional hotel night, or make multiple trips to and from the airport…it seems pretty stressful, right?

Well, it is. But I’d flown standby on around eight trips now, and had always gotten on my flights, and flown business or first class each time. Oh, I’ve had close calls. Once, I was let on mere minutes before departing, and only because I had no check-in luggage and was traveling alone (unlike the four other people ahead of me in the line). Over the summer I visited China with my sister, and we were literally the last two people to get on the plane. On the way back, the Chinese ticket agent refused to give me my boarding pass until I had been officially assigned a seat (usually you get a boarding pass outside security, and are given a seat assignment at the gate), so I had about 45 minutes to make it through a packed security line and ran all the way to the gate to make last call (after arriving at the airport almost three hours early). One of my more nerve-wracking close-calls was when I left late and got to the airport only thirty minutes before my flight, but convinced the ticket agent to give me my boarding pass anyway and ran though the airport to make it to my gate with about fifteen minutes to spare (another reason why carry-on luggage is the best).

I’ve gotten lucky quite a few times, and on my last trip, my luck finally ran out. I was only visiting Japan for a week, and though my flights looked completely clear when I bought my tickets, as the departure date approached, the open seats rapidly started disappearing. Normally, if you miss your flight, you can just ask to be bumped to the same flight the next day, but in this case, the following day’s flight was even tighter than my current flight, and since I was only going to be gone for a week, and you lose a day flying to Japan, I basically had to make this flight, or I’d need to cancel the whole trip. In the end, I made it by the skin or my teeth – second to last to board – but would be flying Economy. Unfortunate, but what can you do. I reached my seat, and it was an aisle seat (always good), and in the first row, so plenty of room to move around! Great!

…then the flight started, and I learned what the drawback to aisle seat, first row was. It turns out that every single person that walks up or down the aisle, without fail, will brush or bump into you. Additionally, the seat is magnetically charged so that it attracts the food carts, and they will hit your chair every time they pass as well. When you have had about six hours of sleep over two days, and want to do nothing more than sleep through your entire fourteen-hour flight, being woken up every twenty minutes throws a bit of a wrench in the plan. Being directly under an air conditioning vent also doesn’t help, and despite wrapping myself up in a scarf, winter jacket, and the provided Delta blanket (so that I looked like a plump, red, soon-to-hatch cocoon), I was still freezing for much of the flight.

But hey! I made it onto my flight, got a lot of (repeatedly interrupted) sleep, and was in Tokyo, so I can’t complain. I ran badly once, but that happens to everyone, right?

As it turns out, you can run worse!

When it came time to return to the US, the person ahead of me on the list was the only standby passenger to get on our flight from Tokyo to New York. Staying an extra day wasn’t really an option, as I was supposed to be at work on Tuesday, was almost out of money and didn’t particularly want to change/withdraw more, and my conveniently-located Tokyo friends were not in Tokyo at the moment, and paying for a hotel near the airport was unappealing. Additionally, the following day’s flight was even worse (once again) than our current flight had been, so staying an extra day basically made no sense.

We (myself and another passenger, Kean) were presented with a few different options – wait and see what tomorrow’s flight looked like, try to catch a flight from Tokyo’s other airport, or fly to Honolulu, and then purchase a new plane ticket with a non-Delta airline into JFK. Option 1 was no good, option 2 was ruled out when those flights were also completely packed, and option 3 didn’t work because who wants to buy another plane ticket? That completely defeats the purpose of flying standby! Fortunately, through some assistance from the lovely woman at the counter, we were able to arrange a series of flights (all on Delta, at no extra cost) – Tokyo to Honolulu, to Atlanta, to Newark – that would get us into New Jersey at 11 AM on Tuesday. I’d be able to catch a train directly down to Hamilton, and would only miss about half a day of work, so that was pretty good, all things considered. The major selling point for this particular flight path, though, was that we’d have a full day in Hawaii! I’ve never been to Hawaii before, so a “free” trip was awesome! Might as well make the best of a bad situation! The flight to Hawaii wasn’t even that full, and neither were any of the others, so it was pretty reasonable that we’d get first class the whole way.

First class to Honolulu! Not bad! I ate one meal, and slept wonderfully through the others, and arrived in Hawaii bright-eyed and ready to enjoy some sun! If you’ve never been to the airport in Honolulu, they don’t believe in glass or doors there. The weather is so perfect that there is no barrier between Nature and the ticket gates – you just stroll right in. There are some roofs to make sure rain doesn’t flood the place, but that’s about it. So there I am in my winter coat, sweater, and scarf, and it is probably about 70 degrees at 7 AM. We decide to double-check the status of our next flight and drop off our luggage before exploring, and it turns out that the airport doesn’t have a luggage room, which is a bit inconvenient – but you can call someone and he’ll come to the airport and pick your luggage up, then drive back when you want to leave. That all sounded a bit sketchy, but maybe that’s just how Hawaii rolls?

Deciding we’d sort out the luggage after checking on our flight, we made our way over to the ticket gates, where we were promptly informed that the Atlanta flight was already overbooked, AND another flight had been canceled and all of those passengers would be looking to get onto the Atlanta flight now, so it was basically double-overbooked, and there was absolutely no chance we were getting on. The next day was also bad. Our best shot at getting out of home in any reasonable amount of time was to take a flight to Los Angeles that was leaving in 45 minutes (and was actually offered to us originally in Tokyo, but we decided on this route since it gave us some time to enjoy Hawaii), and would then fly to JFK, landing at 12:45 AM Tuesday morning. We lamented our bad fortune, made our way back through security, and piled into a super-old plane so ancient it played movies via VCR (which was broken). While I can certainly understand that people get bored and want to talk, I just wanted to sleep, but unfortunately the college volleyball team next to me did not. It was a very long flight.

All long flights come to an end, though, and we landed in LAX, hurried once again to our next (and final!) airplane, which we had been assured was open, and we would have business class for. As it turned out, we missed on business yet again! We did at least get an open seat between us though, so we had slightly more room than normal. Having lived (slept) through three Mondays at this point, I couldn’t really sleep through another one, as much as I wanted to. In-flight movies cost money, so I alternated between reading until I got a headache, and sleeping about forty minutes at a time, and after repeating this process approximately infinity times, we touched down in JFK International Airport. Land! At long last!

But! My journey was not done… The trains weren’t running this late at night, so I couldn’t get home. Instead, my uncle picked me up and brought me to my grandmother’s, where I slept about three hours (somehow I was still exhausted, despite doing nothing but sleep on all of my flights), caught a subway into the city, then a train down to Hamilton, went home for a quick shower, brought my sister to a job interview, and got to work by 11:30. Final tally put me in transit for around 28 hours.

(And if you think that was painful, Kean had already missed flights coming from Singapore to Tokyo two days in a row before I met him in Narita)

In other words, flying standby is great!