My all time favorite Travel Critic of All Time, the venerable Joe Brancatelli, who pulls no punches, and always calls them like he see's them, has a two page story in Portfolio Magazine about WiFi in the Sky.
In the story, Joe basically says that the flying public is cheap, and to his credit, he's right. Most passengers don't need to "stay connected." But for those of us who do, we don't mind the added costs of WiFi.
On Sunday I flew up to Seattle, via Alaska because it was a non-stop. I would rather have flown on Virgin America which has a full fleet of WiFi equipped planes. United is hit or miss, and only on the coast to coast flights, and Southwest hasn't rolled it out yet. That said, when I landed the first thing I did was check email, and then make a call that was pressing.
Had I had WiFi, I would have been able to read the message via Google Voice, and sent back a text to answer the question.
Once business travel rebounds, in flight WiFi will have better days. But for now, the sponsored model is a very good step in the right direction.
P.S. American Airlines is making it easy to discover if the flight will have WiFi with a web page that helps deliver that information.
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