Travel Time-Out

The good news is that this time the flight was canceled before I arrived at the airport. The bad news is that there are (allegedly) no other flights to my destination until the day after tomorrow, so I lose a vacation day to the vagaries of the travel gods.

I made the mistake of checking in on-line, a mistake I will NEVER repeat. First, the prompt led me to “sign up here” to facilitate the process, and I ended up becoming a member of the mileage plus club. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did. However, when I tried to use the new number to actually check in on line, it didn’t work at all because … I got the number after booking the flight two months ago. Once I back-pedaled to the original sign-in page, I used the confirmation number to access my itinerary and that’s when I discovered that my flight is canceled.

Guess I’m glad I checked on it tonight as I would have been totally pissed to find this out tomorrow when I arrived at the airport with luggage in tow! In the course of accessing other flight options, I pressed the “continue” button—and was arbitrarily confirmed on a flight leaving from the airport tonight—in an hour! There was no way to make that connection, so I called customer service, waded through the damned friendly sky’s voice guiding me through the options menu, waited on hold for 20 minutes of endlessly recycling Rhapsody in Blue musak, and then was greeted by a foreign-speaking man who tried to pack as many words into 10 seconds as he possible could.

Whoa, big fella: slow down or we don’t have a chance in hell of getting through the tough stuff!

I explained what had happened, but he happily assured me that I was confirmed on the flight leaving … now … in about 25 minutes. Nope, not going to happen, I explained, and went back through how this happened again. The third time through the explanation, he found it in his heart to stop assuring me I was leaving in minutes, and decided that what I really needed was to rebook the originally canceled flight—tomorrow.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, even after being offered a variety of other airports for departure so I could be at my destination by tomorrow night. I finally caved in and asked about Saturday, and there is a flight that gets me there a day late and probably another dollar short. The good news is I wasn’t charged to change my flight, which I suspected was going to be the next discussion with the airline rep. As a matter of fact, for the inconvenience of waiting an extra day to depart, I am upgraded to economy plus for the longest leg of the flight. It isn’t much, but it’s the best offer I’ve had recently, so I graciously accepted the extra 4”.

I’ve finished rearranging all the little details associated with travel and will figure out tomorrow what I’m going to do to celebrate this unexpected change in my vacation plans. Perhaps there is a movie in my future?