These buggies are nothing more than a fashion statement - no doubt owned by the "Chelsea Tractor" brigade who just because then can - DO
Bwahahaha Leezyjet - you're on dead right on that. If it's any consolation, those idiots who insist on travelling with huge SUV-style buggies probably suffer even more than you. It is quite satisfying to watch some flustered fashion-victim parent struggle to fold up their monster buggy to get it through the x-ray machine, under the doleful glare of those in the queue behind them...
I have a story to cheer you up the next time a horde of impatient parents descends on you to tear their monster buggies out of your hands. There is a particularly fashionable and expensive brand of buggy called the Bugaboo. You see them everywhere in the posher parts of cities around the world. They're not that heavy, and I'll grudgingly admit they are quite nice to "drive" - but they do have the inflatable tyres. Worse still, they collapse into two separate parts: the chassis and the seat assembly. You can see where this is heading... in Sydney, waiting to board our SQ flight to SIN, I spotted a typical yuppie dad pushing his kid around in one of these. I thought - uh oh, poor buggy choice there, mate. Sure enough, 8 hours later, we left him on the airbridge in SIN, clutching one half of his Bugaboo in one hand, his kid in the other, trying to explain to a bemused Singaporean loader that there was another bit of his buggy, somewhere in the bowels of that 747.
Tudor, I agree with the thrust of much of what you say, but a couple of points need comment:
Correct me if I'm wrong but don't infants travel free of charge? And I take it there is no excess baggage charge for your double McLaren buggy? So this extra cost to the airline is no doubt passed on to the customer under the guise of an inflated ticket price.
You are wrong. Well, partly. On some airlines, infants do travel free on short-haul flights. But not, for example, on Easyjet, which charges 15 Euro (not sure if this is a set fee, or varies with the route). For long-haul, infants usually pay 10% of the adult fare - and this can certainly run to hundreds of dollars. Infants typically get a 10kg baggage allowance: I'm not sure if the buggy is supposed to be covered by this. Anyway, the point is that infants are in many cases covering the extra cost to the airline - and more. On long-haul flights, I would say that
they are subsidizing
you.
So not only do I subsidise your children's travel but I have to wait at the back of the queue for my bags which, believe me, are as important to me as your buggy is to you.
This in my view is the only reasonable objection to the delivery-at-door service, at least in theory. But I wonder if in practice delivering the buggies actually makes a noticeable difference to the time it takes to deliver the rest of the baggage. My reason for wondering is that Easyjet offer the service - yet they operate with very tight turnaround times and minimal handling staff. If getting a couple of buggies out really held things up for more than a few seconds, they simply wouldn't do it.