Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, CaryThe Triangle Area
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I stopped using Southwest as the prices were really getting high and I kept getting bumped out of my aisle seat for the family of three coming last on the plane (last b/c they had to get their McDonalds) and couldn't be split up.....happened three times in a row....
Well, you of course have no obligation to move on their account...as said above, "you snooze, you lose". A polite-but-firm "I'm really sorry, but I deliverately booked early so I could get an aisle seat." is excuse enough. One parent and the kid could sit together and the other parent somewhere else. Or (gasp) they could plan in advance and book their ticket early enough to all sit together!
I grew up and was flying out of ATL back when it was Atlanta Municipal (or whatever it was called before Hartsfield), so I am familiar with their hub system. You can now fly DL non-stop from RDU to non-hub destinations like Orlando, Boston, Baltimore and even Cancun, so you could argue they don't have a true spoke-and-hub system like the old days.
I never understood why Northwest had major hubs in Detroit and Minneapolis, some of the worst places to make connections in the Winter.
I never understood why Northwest had major hubs in Detroit and Minneapolis, some of the worst places to make connections in the Winter.
The histories of most hubs date to the 1950s and 1960s where there were ~25 airlines, most of which were regional. The choices of hub cities were simply a reflection of the regional focus of most airlines back then. For example, Delta didn't fly west of Dallas until 1961. In those days, airlines flew only the routes that were assigned to them by the government; they were not free to fly anywhere they wanted. That was finally changed with deregulation in 1978.
The hub at Detroit was started by North Central Airlines -- the airline with the goose logo -- which morphed into Republic Airlines in 1979 and became part of Northwest in 1986. Northwest had been headquartered at MSP since the 1940s.
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