Sigh. I flew on Air Canada to San Francisco on Friday. A nice flight, non-stop from Montreal, on an A319 with upgraded interior, comfortable seats, personal touch video screen. But — guess what? It looks as though they will start charging for the seat-back entertainment as of January 2008! I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.

How do I know about the $$$? Well, compared to previous flights, this time the menus were a bit different. They split the options (ACTV, CBC News, Movies, Satellite Radio) into two parts. Into the very limited selection of free stuff, and then the “good” stuff for which we had to pay. The price? To quote the screen: $null. Obviously a glitch, as they prepare to phase in a new pay-to-watch service. We could progress through to the movies, or Sirius Radio, or whatever, but once you tapped the screen to start viewing the film, it asked for your credit card info. Even worse, they expect you to type in your private card info on the touch screen, with your seat-mates watching!

After complaining, the flight attendant said we weren’t supposed to pay “on this flight”. They tried resetting the system many times, spent the first hour and a half of the flight trying to get it switched back to the old free system. Finally, the pilot contacted Montreal to find out what to do. They needed to reset each seat individually. Once my seat was “fixed”, I could finally watch, as before, for free.

I suspected this new pay system would be introduced next year, and indeed the flight attendant did actually mention “January” to someone seated near me, who asked. Looks like it will be a fixed fee to activate the good stuff for the duration of the flight, but no idea how much it will cost. Currently, on our flight at least, it was “null”.

I’m hoping they’ll be generous and drop their prices by the equivalent amount, just to be fair. Hah, right!