eternaltransit

I'll have a more thorough reply to the points raised above, but alas, it is not yet a slow Tuesday

But I did want to highlight this and fully agree with groundops - befriend some ground staff who work for airlines and not outsourced check-in and you will be surprised and disappointed with humanity upon hearing some of the stories that appear.

In the past six months I've seen, amongst other things:
- A Gold EK pax loudly demanding that EK arrange buggy transport to and from the lounge because she was an "important customer"
- Multiple people, arguing for minutes, that they came on a J ticket and have an onward Y ticket on a different carrier that they should have lounge access because "they paid Emirates for a J ticket"
- A passenger who was so angered by the lack of Financial Times in this outstation lounge that he shouted at the lounge receptionist to go and buy him a copy because he was a Gold member
- A passenger who wrote several emails complaining there was no egg white only omelette at this particular outstation (but there were at others): actually I think they added that for him because of his flight history with EK, but now his nickname internally is "Mr. Omelette"
- A British passenger with the EK MBNA Elite Skywards Credit Card who vehemently insisted that his credit card gave him lounge access at this Asian outstation
- A Gold passenger that insisted he gives so much business to EK that he should be allowed a guest travelling on a different airline to enter with him (the lounge agent of course can easily check a passenger's entire trip history with EK - and did: turns out he only ever bought Saver Y from South Africa)
- Multiple platinum passengers who want to guest additional people into the lounge by saying "that person is my Gold nominee" - and then wasting minutes of agents time by having them phone Skywards who will tell them the same thing, that you need to nominate them online first, then they will process it to add the status to the account
- Multiple QF CL passengers travelling in Y/J, who expect complimentary F upgrades as a matter of course, unlimited baggage and iO ground services (as well as Australian magazines and newspapers in lounges and shout a lot about "this would never happen on QF") as well as guesting x amounts of passengers in: husbands/wives of political QF CL appointees, I'm looking at you!

Some nationalities I have to admit have much worse reputations than others when it comes to demands (and they do love to fall back on what they think are "the rules" - even when they are wrong!)

It's less 70% great and 30% painful, I think it's more towards 90%/10%, but half of those 10% take up 90% of the time of staff - and incidentally I think force even the most professional staff to stop going the extra mile / engaging in "common sense" - i.e. using their full discretion to help out.

Check-in is a slightly different story of course, where the issues are:
- baggage overweight, which cues a lot of DYKWIA status pax to argue with them to waive the excess fees (which themselves take time to process)
- seat selection issues (e.g. being moved by the airline)
- last minute SPML requests at check-in
- travel document issues
- people taking up additional time trying to charm an upgrade

The problem is that these issues take even longer to resolve because most check-in staff not at the hub are outsourced agents who work for multiple airlines, who literally do not care at all if you travel with the airline or not.