Travel Travesties

This is what an airplane looks like from a concourse lounge
I should have been on the damn plane
Instead I was fighting to stay awake in a plastic chair

It was a simple plan: Get up early on Sunday, fly to Baltimore, enjoy an afternoon with family and share a Passover Seder, get up really early on Monday, fly home in time to get to work.

Everything went according to plan until it was 5:15 a.m. on Monday, and I was standing in the airport, about to miss my plane, because U.S. Air lost my reservation. Yes, that's right, they lost my reservation. Despite the fact that I had collected my ticket for the first two legs of my trip the previous day, the airline had somehow decided that I was no longer flying. Well done U.S. Air.

The reason I was given for why my reservation was canceled is this: because my flight on Sunday was delayed (I was on it, it was late), it was listed as if I hadn't traveled at all. Because I hadn't traveled one way, the airline's computers assumed I wouldn't be traveling the other way either. Good thinking.

But it occurred to me: this is exactly why airlines are failing left and right. Ticket prices are going up, airports are increasingly difficult to navigate, and the airlines can't even bother to not delete our confirmed reservations. Who wants that?

Now the best part of all of this was that when I presented myself to the ticket agent, and said, "Excuse me, my reservation appears to be gone," and it took her about 20 minutes to correct this problem (enough time for the plane to leave), I asked what the airline was going to do to make it up to me; she laughed and said "Well, if you had been here when you're supposed to be, when we opened at 3, we could have corrected this."

Yes, that's true, but if I had a reservation, I wouldn't have needed to arrive at 3 in the morning.

So, the useless ticket agent put me on a flight that left only six hours after my scheduled departure, and would get me into Albany about 8 hours after I was supposed to have been there. I tried to explain that this wasn't good enough, and it didn't work.

But I'm never one to take "no" for an answer -- particularly when "no" involves staying in an airport for 5 extra hours. So I took the ticket and proceeded to my gate. I approached the gate agent, and told her that I wanted to get on an earlier flight. She said there was a $25 charge. I said I wasn't going to pay it, because the airline canceled my reservation, she said that was fair enough, and put me on the flight. Why the original person didn't do this, I don't know.

So now I has only three hours behind schedule. The next hurdle was a connecting flight in New York City. It was the same situation, I was on one flight late in the day, but I really wanted to get onto an earlier flight, which was supposedly booked solid.

I presented myself to a flustered gate agent at La Guardia, and he told me he'd call me if there was an opening when the flight boarded... three hours down the line. Eventually the flight boarded -- an hour later than scheduled, and I was able to get on board.

I arrived in Albany six hours later than scheduled, and missed enough of the day that I was hardly able to do anything productive at work. So much for my simple plan.

Here are some stats from Monday:
Waking hours: 3:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Hours in airports: 7
Hours on planes: 2 hours
Pages in books and magazines read: 271
Useful ticket agents encountered: 1

The one upshot from the day was that I slept quite soundly last night. I'm planning on lodging a formal complain with U.S. Air, I'll let you know if they respond.