dhuey

Before I rant on Gol, let me say that my wife and I had a delightful trip to Brazil this past week. Once we were onboard the Gol flight from São Paulo to Florianópolis, everything was fine. The flight attendants were very nice -- no problem onboard.

But what an absurd system Gol has created for passenger check-in. My wife and I flew into GRU on AA. We put 4 hours between our arrival at GRU and our Gol departure to FLN. We figured that would mean lots of sitting around time in GRU. No.

Turns out we needed all of that 4 hours to make the flight to FLN, and that's entirely because Gol is the most unintelligent Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes I can imagine.

We were travelling heavy -- above the free baggage limits. My wife was an entrant in Ironman Brazil, so we had a big bike box and two big suitcases with us. We were totally okay with paying some extra money for this baggage.

Even if you don't have extra baggage fees, you wait a really, really long time in the Gol baggage drop line at GRU. Over an hour, for a flight that will end up being shorter than your baggage drop off wait.

And if you have extra baggage fees to pay, then add about 45 minutes to that. The baggage agents cannot take payments: they direct you to other Gol agents in GRU. We went to one office, then another. We paid cash. This was a big mistake -- the agent had no change and disappeared for 10 minutes while she got change.

After we finally paid the excess baggage fees, we returned to the baggage check-in guy. He gave us our boarding passes. We went through security.

When we got to the gate, boarding was well underway. Half of the passengers had boarded.

The takeaway: give yourself a whole bunch of time if you have Gol in mind.