eryone who has traveled with a surfboard knows that airline board bag fees, for the most part, are total bullshit. Everyone except airlines, apparently. So a few days ago when Bob Hurley and Kelly Slater very publicly called out Hawaiian Airlines about their bullshit board bag fees, everyone agreed. Everyone except Hawaiian Airlines, who fired back with a very long response that says basically nothing. When it’s down to brass tacks, board bag fees make no sense.
First, here’s Kelly Slater’s post:
And here’s Hawaiian Airline’s response:
Now, there’s a pretty major flaw here, aside from the entire idea of charging extra for surfboards is total bullshit (on most airlines, at least, flying with surfboards is more expensive than pretty much anything else). It’s the two-board limit. “The majority of the other US airlines have the same rule, for the same reason,” they wrote. But the majority of other US airlines don’t, in fact, have that rule, a fact that Carissa Moore picked up on pretty quickly. “This isn’t a rule with ANY other airline. Only you,” she wrote on Instagram. Carissa Moore, as everyone knows, is basically a ball of shining, shimmering ball of fuzzy niceness. She, as far as I know, has never said anything critical about anyone ever. I’m sure that’s not true, but when Carissa Moore is calling you out, you’re doing something wrong. According to Grind TV, “United, American and Alaska Airlines all allow as many surfboards as a passenger can pack inside a board bag so long as it stays under a weight limit.”
And she wasn’t the only one to take sides. Mark Healey jumped in on the action, too. “@hawaiianairlines those are the worst excuses for a bad policy,” he wrote. Coco Ho, knowing that brevity is the soul of wit, wrote a simple, “Lame.”
Which it is. It is lame. When Kelly Slater said it’s “a default profit racket,” he hit the nail on the head. And Hawaiian Airline’s response is basically a long-winded way of saying, “Nope, sorry! What’re you going to do about it?”
