THE airport is stressful enough without an act of officious skyway robbery at the check-in counter.

Still, it did at least give the experience a point of interest.

The guts of it was that when my son fronted the desk with his ticket to Thailand, the Jetstar bird reckoned he couldn't board without a ticket out of Thailand as well. This, despite the fact that he had all the visas lined up for country-hopping to Europe with the very reasonable plan of buying discount fares on the cheap and dangerous airlines to be found locally there.

I'm all for a good blue with an unreasonable uniform behind a desk, but in this case, I just stood back and enjoyed the show.

Another couple, mature, well-healed and sensible-looking had also fallen foul of some bodgie rule, dubiously applied where the Jetstar girl thought that despite their trip being only for five days, their passports were expiring in three weeks (from memory) and they couldn't go anywhere either.

Of course, what makes this all a bit thrilling is that the much anticipated flight is going to leave without you but, in a very real sense, with your ticket.

The girl maintained her pasted-on expression and steadfastly refused to see reason as the departure time grew ever nearer. In the end, the boy threw in the towel and bought a ticket on his credit card. I was smart enough to go all vague when he wondered if I'd pick up the tab. If a refund was to be had, which it eventually was, he'd try a lot harder to get it back if it was his money. Subsequent communications with the airline proved remarkably old fashioned, with them insisting on a mailed complaint which they digested and responded to at a glacial rate, eventually reimbursing in a number of payments taking nearly two years and avoiding any form of communication or update in that period.

I would dearly like to have ABC radio Jon Faine's phone book because he alone appears to have immediate access to airline people that actually respond.

And after all that, my boy's Swedish girlfriend just went through the same nonsense with the same airline on a five-day trip to NZ on Tuesday. They made her miss her flight and buy two more tickets, causing the usually cool Swede to become quite flustered, I hear.