By Ray Hanania

When you go on vacation, you hope that it will be a pleasant experience where you can relax and enjoy the time off from your work.

Over the years, vacations have changed. They are more expensive. Some locations, like Mexico, have become dangerous, with many resorts placing armed soldiers on beaches to protect tourists from drug gang violence.

Health issues like the pandemic add to travel hassles, requiring all kinds of paperwork and tests.

To save money, airlines created a la carte pricing to pay for everything; unless, of course, you are willing to sign up for their high-interest rate credit cards and get some benefits.

Ray Hanania

You have to pay to check a bag, pay to carry a bag and pay to get on the plane before everyone else–even though your seats have been pre-selected. You pay for snacks, which usually are terrible. Worse, when you get on the plane, you have to fight with other passengers for above seat baggage space because too many people drag all their bags on the plane. No one stops them.

The wait through security is a hassle. You can speed up by paying, of course, for a TSA pre-check and Global Entry to avoid being treated like a terrorist drug dealer.

Wait time is longer because airline companies have laid off many employees to save money. They push consumers to use their cell phone apps.

The app is supposed to make it easier for flight check-in. Early check-in doesn’t make sense when you have to drop off a bag at the check-in counter anyway; but when you spend thousands on a vacation, you’re afraid to let one stupid rule derail or delay your trip.

Unfortunately, apps are designed by computer geeks who have brilliant understandings of math and formulas, but lack common sense. Probably these computer geeks rarely leave their chairs in front of their computer screens and never travel anywhere except to the toilet, their bedroom or pornography websites.

The biggest hassle in today’s “high-tech” world are the airline apps they force you to use. The apps vary in complexity although they are supposed to be simple. They are not.

Recently, I used the Emirates app to go to Dubai. It was fairly simple, although the main focus of that app is to try to get me to spend more money, to upgrade to better seating or register for Wi-Fi, which on the Emirates flight I took never worked, even though I paid for it.

But the worst app I have used belongs to United Airlines. The app is driven by a push to get me to sign up for their high interest rate credit card.

It requires you to fill out information repeatedly for the same flight. For example, I had to register for my flight and upload an image of my passport. Once I did that, I had to upload an image of my “travel documents.” When I went to get my boarding pass, they said I had to upload my passport, even though I already did.

When I did everything, the system simply responded, “Try again.”

Try again? The process took me a half hour to fill in all the information. And there are three of us.

All told, it took six hours to check in for a vacation flight. By that time, my blood pressure and anger levels were so high I wasn’t sure taking an eight-day vacation would be enough to relax.

As I wrote last week about my recent trip to Dubai, while the flight was a discomforting 14 hours plus, and 10-hour time zone difference, the real hassle was going through O’Hare Airport, which literally is a filthy pig sty.

The floors were dirty. The bathrooms were filthy. The processing centers for travelers were jam-packed. Even with TSA pre-check, I had to wait in line for more than an hour. Wow. I didn’t have to take my belt off for the $88 I spent for the TSA pre-check. Big deal.

Returning was even worse. Going through customs and security took five hours. Half the time was spent standing in line and looking for my bag, which was buried in a pile of luggage from several flights. Then I was trying to get to the parking lot on a shuttle bus, which was dirty and smelled like it had never been cleaned.

Maybe some travelers used it as a toilet, as the toilets at O’Hare were frightening.

Maybe the days of traveling on a nice vacation are over for this generation.

Check out Ray Hanania’s columns and political podcasts at hanania.com.