Allegiant AUS-LAS

I admit, I’m not a fan of these low-fare carriers. I even avoid Southwest Airlines as much as possible. I decided to give Allegiant a try since there airfare just couldn’t be beat for a particularly busy weekend in Las Vegas, where all of the hotels on the Strip were over $200 each. I booked months in advance and paid $82.00 for the “Legroom+” seats (roundtrip) so we wouldn’t be too cramped on the 2.5hr flight. However, upon boarding we quickly learned the Row 3 on this 757-200 config does not include any extra legroom…see for yourself

After you add up all of the ancillary charges…priority boarding (to get your bag in the overhead) and paying to carry-on luggage…the price comes out close to what you’d pay on the legacy carries. I totally get their business model, however it is their customer service (or lack thereof) that convinced me to give my hard-earned money to another airline in the future. The flight crew talked to everyone like they were in high school and they somehow needed to exert their authority over everyone. All I’m looking for is a little niceness. I realize everyone has their bad days, but we had the same crew both ways and their attitudes were the same (imo = we just don’t care about you at all). And this crew must not like Allegiant either because there was no “welcome aboard” or “thank you for flying”. They basically wanted to everyone to (as Southpark’s Cartman eloquently puts it) ‘listen to my autori-ty!’.

 
Our flight back was unfortunately in the same row as the plane was full. Here is a picture of what the legroom should look like in “Legroom+”, as they call it:

While after waiting over 15min per call three different times, I did finally get a customer service agent who understood my issue and gave me instructions to mail in a complaint. The time to put my ‘evidence’ together is such a waist of my time. But it’s the principle of the matter. We’ll see how long they take to refund me my $82 back…

And Allegiant, one more thing, if you want to stay in business and beat the competition and charge everyone for everything, at least stop being cheap and apply for whatever certificate you need for your customers to use their electronics during take-off and landing. If this doesn’t affect every other legacy carriers operations, there should be no reason people cannot do the same when flying on your airline…or maybe you’re just waiting to figure out how to charge for that too. 😐

However, at least the entire trip wasn’t wasted – Heart you Britney! 🙂