I was pretty pleased with the upgrade I managed to secure heading to Barcelona, but it seems that making this archaic process work used up ALL my travel karma. Last Sunday, returning from Barcelona via Munich to Shanghai I experienced the most utterly miserable flight experience of my life. I was disappointed that there wasn’t availability for an upgrade to try out my second shiny United certificate but I was absolutely not prepared for what happened.

I still have Gold Star Alliance status so I boarded early in the process. Much later in the boarding process the passenger who had the neighbouring seat arrived. To say that this man was morbidly obese does not fully explain his size. He took some minutes to squeeze himself into his seat – although in actual fact much of him failed to squeeze into his seat and essentially overflowed over the armrests on both sides. Needless to say he needed a seatbelt extension, although in the event of an incident, even without a belt he would have remained firmly wedged in his seat as his belly was braced against the seat back in front of him. His tray table was unique in having a more unpleasant flight experience than I did. Think I’m exaggerating? Nope. Here’s the picture.

I was of course horrified at the prospect of spending the eleven hour flight without the benefit of the use of a significant proportion of my seat. It is a source of considerable regret that I did not immediately call a member of the cabin crew and insist on the exclusive use of the entirety of the seat I had paid for. I did not, however as a) it was late in the boarding process, the cabin crew looked really busy and I didn’t want to hold up departure, b) given how long it took the gentleman to get into his seat I thought it would take too long for him to stand up to let me talk to the cabin crew and, being British I was uncomfortable about complaining about this man’s excess weight across the top of his gargantuan bulk. So I resolved to find another seat once the plane had reached cruising altitude.

When the plane reached altitude and the fasten seatbelt signs were switched off I duly headed off to speak to them. I spoke to two separate cabin crew members to ask for another seat. Both told me that the flight was fully booked so there was nowhere to move to. Both were somewhat evasive when I explained the problem and were reluctant to help in any way despite the fact that I was very close to tears on hearing this news.

As a result I experienced the most unpleasant flight of my life – with my left arm and shoulder mostly squashed under the monumental vastness of my fellow passenger. It goes without saying that I was unable to sleep for the duration. The incredible bulk next to me had no such problems however, so for many hours I experienced a prolonged and frankly revolting series of full body twitches and shivers as he moved in his sleep. Do I also need to mention that it felt like sitting next to a furnace because of the heat he produced?

It is now several days later and I’m still horrified by the experience. I do think that Lufthansa neglected their duty of care. Not only is it reasonable to expect to use the seat you paid for, but in the event of an incident I would have been effectively trapped in my seat – so the lack of an effective Lufthansa policy in this matter is also a safety issue.

I want to share my feelings with Lufthansa. Lufthansa don’t want to know about opinions. There’s a generic compliment/ complaint email form buried somewhere in the website. I don’t want a generic email – I want to complain to an actual human being- preferably one responsible for customer relations. I know these people exist in Lufthansa, but they are impossible to find (check LinkedIn and see if you can find any…). As a result I’m writing to pretty much anyone I can think of as a sort of personal therapy. I really want to share this experience with them though (not by phone as they can’t then see the photo) so if anyone has any Lufthansa contacts please let me know.

*update 18the March* – I have been in correspondence with Lufthansa for the last week or so. So far they have offered frankly insulting compensation. So far it appears while they are extremely rigorous in policing excess baggage, they are not so strict when it comes to excess body. So they won’t make you share your seat with somebody’s excess bag, however they have no issues with you having to share it with somebody’s excess blubber. The correspondence continues.

This weekend I fly to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress. I’m really pleased to be going to the show after a few years’ absence and am really looking forward to catching up with old friends and new technologies but the flight isn’t going to be much fun.  It’s a long way from Shanghai, particularly if you are in the back of the plane, and I admit it, I’ve acquired quite a taste for the sharp end over the last few years.

My airline status is linked to United so I tend to try to fly with them when possible (I really am a sucker for those long haul upgrades). However, Shanghai to Barcelona on United involved four flights so I booked with Lufthansa. Easy so far. The next part of the plan was to ask United to apply a couple of my Systemwide upgrades to the flights – they are both part of the joined up Star Alliance happy family after all.

So I called United to ask them to apply my upgrades. No problem – they said. Great, that was easy.

But this is United Airlines we are talking about.

Like an idiot I assumed that they would just press a button that would send the request for upgrade waitlisting to Lufthansa – it was an eticket that was booked online after all. That would clearly be the most obvious way of doing things so of course that’s not at all how it works.

Instead of using the wonders of the Internet to magically transmit this information from one company to another, United has a slightly different process. They print out actual certificates and send them. Even worse, they printed out certificates in America and then sent them to me in China. They didn’t even use Fedex to send them as they had promised, they used regular mail. This took just over 3 weeks to arrive (actually that was pretty impressive – I just received a card this week sent FROM CHINA before Christmas).

Here’s what the little beauties look like:

I’ve had a theory for some while about United. I think that new planes are equipped with shiny new cabin crew, which then ages slowly with the same plane (although presumably with fewer parts replacements). That would explain the pensioners they have serving business and first class. Seriously, some of them just dodder around during the flight – so much for being there “for your safety”.  I now suspect the same thing happens with United’s processes. The printing things off and posting them worked just fine in the 1980s, so why should they be changed now?

That said I felt like I’d just received one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets when they arrived. Now at least I’m in with a tiny chance of comfort (although United business seats flatten to a rather jaunty angle that makes you constantly feel like you are sliding off feet first….)

I’ll find out tomorrow if this has all been worth it. Tomorrow I take my shiny new certificates to check in where I will have to ask them nicely to consider me for an upgrade. In my experience the Pudong airport check in staff have not been terrifically customer service focused, or indeed interested in human beings in general so wish me luck!

**UPDATE** I got my upgrade. There was some consternation at the check in desk but got a business class seat. OK the seat in question was one of those that is described as “flat” suggesting horizontal, but actually is flat at a rather jaunty angle – I imagine that if you reversed the head and feet that it would be the perfect angle for waterboarding. I digress…the weird paper based certificate resulted in me having a rather nice seat and mostly recognisable food items. Happy days.

Almost constant companions during our trip to Nepal were the Himalayas themselves. In Pokara, I was charmed that from almost anywhere in town you were watched over but not a single peak, but a whole range of impressive mountains. The one that captured my imagination from the start was my first actual sighting of Everest with its distinctive black pyramid shaped peak.

Am I tempted to try to climb it? Well I can’t pretend that I didn’t think about it. Briefly. Some of this was brought about by meeting a Nepali girl who has climbed the mountain several times. She is about 80llbs soaking wet so if she can do it I figured I might have a chance. I certainly like the idea of a challenge on such a huge scale, but while fit but relatively inexperienced people have reached the summit in the past, without significant appropriate experience it seems pretty stupid. If anything goes remotely wrong (and when things go wrong in the mountains it happens quickly and tends to be bad) you really want to know what you are doing up there. So realistically I don’t think I’m about to put in  years and years of mountaineering training and hardship…oh yes and it costs an absolute fortune. I don’t have $60k+ burning a hole in my bank account right now.

I’ve decided instead to focus on climbing mountains vicariously. Since my return from Nepal I’ve devoured a series of books on the subject – I’ve actually read Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” twice – a gripping account of the tragic events of the 1996 season, in addition to Anatoli  Boukreev’s account of the same events in “The Climb” plus several of Ed Viesturs excellent narratives of his own climbing career.

What I hadn’t realised prior to reading these books is quite how debilitating extreme altitude is. Of course I appreciated that it is harder to function with less oxygen, but what I hadn’t realised is that breathing supplemental oxygen only somewhat mitigates the problem. Modern climbing plans for Everest and other 8,000m peaks tend to involve a series of sorties to increasingly high camps to maximise acclimatisation. These ascents, sometimes including nights spent at high camps are interspersed with descents to basecamp for people to recover. Over around 25 thousand feet is what is called the “Death Zone”. As the body just deteriorates at that altitude or above, the strategy is generally to spend as little time as possible there. It seems that climbers head for the highest camp, rest there until maybe 11pm, then make their summit push from there overnight. Whether or not the summit has been reached by around 1pm or 2pm the following day, climbers often plan to turnaround and head to more hospitable altitudes asap. Just like diving at depth, the hypoxia experienced at altitude impairs a climbers ability to think clearly so decision making isn’t always great.  Some of the problems I’ve been reading about are in part due to people just not turning round when they should, leading to running out of air and things just deteriorating from there. As with so many things, it’s never a single factor that causes problems but you just aren’t able to survive long at that altitude. The hypoxia also affects how you feel – I was a bit disappointed that all the climbers I’ve heard/ read about have reported just a feeling of numbness at the top rather than the elation you’d expect. All that effort for numbness. Still, as Ed Viesturs says, getting to the top is only half way…you need to get back down again too.

In any case. It is bloody tough but a lot easier now than it used to be.

Visiting a small museum in the Nepal, I was able to view a series of exhibits about the first attempts* at the summit and the eventual successful Hillary/ Tenzing effort. What makes their achievement all the more impressive is the gear they used – clumpy leather boots that would have been cold when wet, heavy tents and not a scrap of Gore-Tex in sight.

* My favourite account of summit attempts relates to one mad Englishman who planned to crashland a small plane on the lower slopes of the mountain and climb up from there. The idea is totally bonkers and that’s before you hear that he didn’t actually have either flying or climbing experience. Insane and possibly the earliest recorded incidence of what they call ‘summit fever’.