Online Airline Check-In

I have travel anxiety, and I begin getting anxious when I start packing, and it reaches a peak when I get on the airplane. I’m worried about being on time, getting to my destination quickly, and not being held up by people’s inefficiencies. But before e-ticketing, I was even more nervous. Before it all went online, travelers were told where to go, how to go, what to pay, and where the journey would take them. Now, they have much more leverage to build their trips and pay prices they can afford. I’m a spokesman for Priceline, a company that is a leader in this revolution of booking travel, and I support them because travel has become really difficult (I remember when you could just walk up to the gate and get your ticket). That’s changed, and so have all the security policies: I have a piece of metal in my body—I like to say it’s shrapnel from the two world wars, but it’s not—so I get wanded every time I go through the airport. But despite all the new policies at the airport—not to mention the wanding—we still have more of a say now in how we travel. You can look at pictures online, find new routes you hadn’t thought of, and even get prices on packages that you couldn’t believe. Suddenly your imagination is activated: you can taste the food, see the colors, and smell the world before you even print out that boarding pass.