The abandonment of any notion of customer service - now often called "customer assistance" or, even better, "customer support" (as in we will supportively assist you by directing you to our website or app, which may or may not be helpful/functioning) - is never clearer than when one travels.
Hideous delays and last-minute cancellations of flights have become so commonplace that airlines now advise building in a cushion of an extra day or two on each end of one's journey. In other words, in addition to the cost of your actual flight, you should be prepared to pay even more in time or money because the airlines certainly are not. On a long-planned holiday trip to London and Antwerp, Belgium, in December, our flight from LAX was abruptly moved to the next day - no warning, no explanation, no American Airlines personnel at the gate. Just a series of alerts that those who had the AA app received, along with the reassurance that those who qualified would be issued vouchers via email for lodging and food. Since we lived in the L.A. area (albeit a 90-minute drive from LAX at that time of day), we were out of luck - we could either pay hundreds of dollars for back and forth cab fare or book our own hotel near the airport. (Other family members, leaving via Charlotte, N.C., had it even worse - a malfunction trapped a plane full of people, including my son and his girlfriend, on the runway for five hours before they were released, after midnight. When they finally tracked down an actual staff member, they were given vouchers to a motel that appeared, as Melissa McCarthy's character says in "Spy," "so murdery" that they decided to book their own.) As if that were not enough to prevent us from ever traveling again, we were victims of the great Dec. 30 <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/world/europe/eurostar-canceled-channel-t unnel-london-paris.html> Eurostar shutdown, during which all trains into, and out of, the U.K. were abruptly canceled for more than 24 hours due to a power-grid failure in the English Channel Tunnel. Advertisement We had just been assured that we would soon be boarding our train from Brussels when the news came down over a loudspeaker, in four languages. Read more: <https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-10-29/old-female-acti on-stars-emma-thompson-down-cemetery-road-riot-women?utm_source=yahoo&utm_me dium=promo_module&utm_campaign=rss_feed> Commentary: Forget 'I'm too old for this': Women over 60 are redefining action stardom Picture, if you will, hundreds of now-stranded travelers, clamoring in panic-stricken English, French, Dutch and German as they streamed into the Brussels-Midi station where one Eurostar agent, one, stood, not suggesting alternate means of reaching our destination but handing out Xeroxed pages directing everyone to the Eurostar app and website. Where no tickets were available for days and the process of claiming a refund or compensation for lodging and other expenses was an endless maze of questions that needed to be answered when all anyone wanted to know was how in the hell do we get to London now. With no flights available until Jan. 3, days after we were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow Airport, we finally rented a car, at hideous cost, and fled Europe, with some historical poignancy, via midnight-landing ferry from Dunkirk. (If it sounds fun, I am not telling it right.) My point is not that travel should always go smoothly - things break, weather turns, accidents happen. My point is that if you are a company that is paid to get people from one place to another, you should have enough personnel to help those people reach their destinations as quickly and seamlessly as possible should things go wrong. Instead of, you know, casting them literally onto the street and forcing them to conjure up their own imperfect, and very expensive, DIY solutions. Because that's what the digital age has made us - a DIY economy in which millions of jobs no longer exist not because computers do the work, but because the work has been shifted, via computers, directly onto the consumer. Who increasingly has little or no choice in the matter. Try to get a car at an auto rental agency without booking it online first; you might as well attempt to barter your watch and three chickens as payment. Read more: <https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2025-09-10/rabid-bat-dog-encounter- rabies-vaccines?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=promo_module&utm_campaign=rss_fe ed> Commentary: I thought rabies was a thing of the past - until my dog had a run-in with a rabid bat It would be one thing if, by scheduling your own appointments, keeping track of your own medical tests, bagging your own groceries and filling out all the information needed to book your own reservations for planes, trains and automobiles, you got a discount. But no; half the time, corporations have the audacity to charge a service fee on top of the money they have saved by not hiring someone to do the work you, the consumer, just did. Is it any wonder why people are so testy these days? Especially when, having done all the work only to be informed by alert that it was all in vain; they have to wait in line for the one teller/manager/gate agent available to explain to them that they "just" need to manage their booking/transaction online. How much better it would be if there were actual people, trained and experienced, in numbers large enough to prevent endless queues, to make customers feel like customers again, instead of isolated pioneers quietly losing their minds in an effort to buy whatever goods and services companies are selling. I'm not saying it would solve all of our problems, but it would go a long way to lowering the national temperature. It is amazing what a genial, helpful interaction can do to lift everyone's spirits and make people feel like they are respected and valued, as individuals with reasonable needs, and not just faceless bundles of credit card information and regrettable meltdown moments. Not to mention all the jobs, and career paths, at all levels, restoring customer service could provide. Because being unemployed tends to make people quite aggravated and unhappy too. <https://www.latimes.com/newsletters/sign-up-for-our-entertainment-alerts?ut m_source=yahoo&utm_medium=newsletter_module&utm_campaign=entertainment-alert s> Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. <https://s.yimg.com/nq/storm/assets/enhancrV2/23/logos/latimes.png> Sign up for our Entertainment Alerts Get the latest news on film, television, music, art and culture from the Los Angeles Times. This story originally app
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