I hate airports. I think most people hate airports. There was a time that I can remember when I was young where airports were actually a fun experience and travel was something that people probably looked forward to. These days we are all treated like cattle and airports are ground zero for entirely too many rules and regulations that result in most of us simply dreading the process as soon as we enter the front door of the facility.
Recently a friend of mine came to visit and ended up being subjected to a completely ridiculous ruling that resulted in him not being able to board his flight and instead had to take a grueling 20+ hour bus ride in order to get home. It was all just a technicality as well.
This isn't a complaint about how no matter where you are in the world and no matter where you are going that you are going to be standing in a line that barely moves for ages. This is always a problem and one that airlines don't seem to be overly concerned about unless you are one of the wealthy people that gets to use the super special first-class line that I will never have enough money to participate in.
Instead this is about an arbitrary rule that if you can't comply with it, you don't get to fly even though the reasoning for the disallowing you for flying is completely ridiculous and in contradiction to why the "rule" exists in the first place.
In Thailand, you do NOT need to travel on a domestic flights with your passport. It would be nuts for them to expect you to do so. Most of my friends both Thai and foreign will choose to leave their passport safely at home and instead travel with some other form of ID such as a driving license. This is precisely what my friend did when he game to visit me in the past week.
He flew up here with no issue because most airline staff are very aware of the fact that just because you are not Thai, doesn't mean that you have to have international travel documents in order to board a domestic flight that at no point in time is going to leave Thai airspace, let alone land outside of it.
When he went to go board his flight to go back to Phuket the airline staff would not issue his ticket because unbeknownst to him, his license had expired just one day prior to his departure back to his home city. They absolutely refused to allow him on the plane because his ID had expired by a day.
Now let's look at what the point of having ID is ok? Is it or is it not simply proof of identity? I think that most logical people would say that it is precisely for identification and I understand the issue they would have if the ID was say, 20 years out of date and the person in the picture doesn't look like the person standing in front of them, but it was clearly him in the picture since the photo was taken just a few years ago. There was no denying that it is him and he had several other forms of ID such as membership cards and credit / bank cards that all had the same name on it. It is clearly him in the ID yet they would not let him on the plane because the ID was out of date.
Was he going to be flying the plane or driving some other vehicle? Of course not! He was going to be sitting in a chair just like everyone else on the plane other than the pilots. So I would love to have a reasonable explanation as to why it is that a recently expired driving license is not a valid form of ID. It's just stupid!
So not only did my friend lose his $100 flight or whatever it cost, but now he had no choice but to get on an extremely long bus trip back to his home
I can assure you that it is going to take far longer than the 20 hours that it describes on that picture too. These busses stop all the time in order to pick up more passengers so I would imagine that his just over an hour flight has turned into a horrible 30 hour road journey on some of the most dangerous roads in the world.
Crap like this makes me hate airports even more than I previously did. I know for a fact that they do not need ID such as a driving license in order for a person to get on a plane because recently I got on a plane without showing any ID at all. I just showed the credit card that I used to book the ticket with and that was that.
I would imagine that my friend complained to management in an attempt to simply get on the plane but in the end they weren't having it and he had no choice but to get on a stupid bus.
I understand there are rules out there for everything in life but I also think that a logical person should understand the difference between a rule and the reasonable application of said rule. Negating an ID that is clearly the same person that is standing in front of you because it went out of date a single day ago is not a reasonable application of a rule.
Have you ever had this happen to you? Sheesh.