We're Back!

Hi everyone. We're back on the road again! Well, sort of. I'm here in my kitchen as I type this. But we had every intention of being halfway to Rio de Janeiro at this very moment. And I think I will blog about the next three weeks of adventure, since I had so much fun doing that on our last big excursion.

So why am I in my kitchen then? I'm glad you asked. But I'm not glad I'm home again. Here's the skinny. But beware, while it is a fascinating story worth your time, it is most definitely a rant...

It all started about a month back when Carol got a cryptic email from Expedia about how our flight itinerary had changed. She called. They politely informed her that our flight to Rio had been rerouted to Sao Paolo.  "Would that be OK?" Uh, no. The two cities are a couple of hundred miles apart! Why would that be OK? So, politely, Carol asked if perhaps we could get a different flight, as a connection from Sao Paolo to Rio seemed out of the question for Expedia.  "Sure, no problem" says the woman from Expedia. They offered one with a 17 hour layover in Mexico City. No deal. "OK, here's one that stops in Denver, then in Miami, then gets to Rio only 14 hours later than your original flight. How would that be?"  NO! says Carol, a little less politely.  Finally, after Carol maintains her cool, but shoots laser beams through her phone to Phoenix, where corporate headquarters for our new favorite travel company resides, the woman gets us a flight on a different airline through Houston with only a three hour layover, and then straight into Rio.  Well done, Carol, once again.  Apparently they only offer the reasonable options if you threaten to get unreasonable with them.  But all is well, we believe, and think very little of it after that.

The big day arrives.  Our friendly neighbor drops us off at the Airporter depot and with little ado the family arrives at SFO before 11:00 a.m. for a 12:45 flight to Houston. We head to the ticket counter. The automatic teller only registers the adult reservations. Apparently there is a problem with the kids' reservation.  Our names pop up, but the kids' names don't.  We calmly wait for a United Airlines representative to help us.  She transfers us to a nice man who seemingly has no problem dealing with these sorts of situations.  Ten minutes later we are back in business, boarding passes in hand, bags checked and gone.  Carol gets to take the express line through security.  The rest of us get to do it the hard way.  The line isn't too bad.  We arrive at the gate with an hour to go before scheduled lift-off.  Carol even gets our seat assignments changed at the gate so that we can sit together as all that was available originally was four scattered seats, since Expedia didn't bother to get us seat assignments when they changed the flight, so we only got them that morning. But things were looking up.  Our seats were now together.  Time to get a burrito before boarding.  Brasilia here we come!

We let everybody board ahead of us.  No reason to choke down the burritos just to sit on the plane for half an hour before take off.  Flight leaves at 12:30.  We approach the gate at 12:10.  Carol's ticket goes through.  My ticket goes through.  Wait, there is a problem with Chloe's ticket.  It doesn't exist.  This is just a boarding pass.  Josh's has the same problem.  "We're sorry, your children cannot board the plane." Say what?!  How could we have been issued boarding passes without a ticket?  The gate counter people type on their computer terminals.  There is nothing they can do.  "We're sorry, but you will have to call Expedia to get this worked out."  But the flight leaves in ten minutes!

The nightmare has only just begun. Expedia won't help us. Our flight leaves without us. Carol is on hold with Expedia.  The United folks tell us that everything is OK. There is another flight to Houston that arrives with enough time for us to catch the Rio flight. It is only half a mile away on the other side of the airport.  It leaves in 90 minutes. That should be sufficient time to get things worked out. "Should be" and reality rarely mesh under these sorts of circumstances, I've found.  Carol is on the phone still.  She begs.  She pleads.  They put her on hold.  She threatens, she chastises.  They put her on hold.  We walk to the new gate with her still on hold.  I call Expedia to complain that Carol has been on hold for over an hour and the next flight is about to leave.  Heads will roll! I get conveniently disconnected.  The new gate employee for United starts to try really hard to get us on the flight.  We offer to pay for new tickets since there are obviously empty seats as we still have a reservation even without tickets.  He can't do it.  Expedia has us locked out somehow.  He gets on the phone with the help desk that only airline employees can access.  Carol is still on the phone, sometimes talking, but mostly on hold.  Nothing gets settled.  The second flight leaves.  There will be no flight to Rio today.

What's more, our luggage is now in Houston without us.  It cannot be sent back to SFO in time for us to pick it up tomorrow and send it on its way again.  It cannot move on internationally without us.  Either we have to fly through Houston to get our bags checked on to Rio, or we can arrive in Rio, and then write up a request for our bags to be sent to us, and they will come within two days.  The problem is that we were only staying three nights in Rio before moving on to other parts of Brazil and South America.  We've lost tonight.  We have only two nights left.  We won't get our bags doing that.

Carol is still on the phone as I type this at 5:45 p.m.  She has either been on hold or talking with them or steaming when they don't call us back after she got disconnected (thrice, now) because now she has to call them back and start the whole discussion again with a new rep.  She lost all of her patience hours ago, but she refuses to let me do the hard work on the phone.  Probably because she knows I will start swearing like a sailor within seconds of asking to be put on hold one more time.

So let us count the problems with this story, shall we?  First Expedia messed up when they changed our original flight (not to forget their complete lack of forthcoming options the first time around when the changes were made - strike one).  They did not reissue the kids tickets.  That is strike two.  Next, they were unwilling to suck it up and tell United they would pay for the seats that we already had reserved and had paid Expedia for, in a timely fashion (twice, as we stood at two different gates, begging and pleading to no avail).  That is strike three and four.  They have had Carol on hold for well over four hours total. Remember this fiasco began at 12:10 when we first learned at the gate that the kids' tickets were not to be found despite the boarding passes in their hot little hands.  Strike five.  But is that it?  No.  What is left of Carol is in the bedroom on the phone still, and it is almost 6:00.  The three times she has been disconnected, nobody bothered to continue working on the problem and nobody bothered to call her back.  They have her phone number.  Heck they have every digit associated with us since birth!  Carol has told them Josh's and Chloe's birthdate over a dozen times at this point!  Strike six? Or is that seven?  Here's the last thing I heard Carol scream into the phone just moments ago:  "NO. NO. NO!  We were not no-shows!  We were at the airport for over four hours today!" I don't think she's making much progress.

And what about United Airlines' part in all of this?  Why is it that two hours before our flight left, when we first discovered that there was a problem with the kids' tickets, did they act as if all was well, and issue us boarding passes.  At that time we theoretically could have called Expedia and actually had time (assuming Expedia reps were both competent and ethically sound, which they are neither) to work things out. United's little oversight made it so that we only discovered the problem 20 minutes before take-off, thereby screwing us for certain.  And why did they take our bags if we had no tickets?  And how do they accept our reservation and issue boarding passes without a ticket in the first place?

What have we lost so far? One of three nights in Rio is gone, along with the money for the house we are renting. Sixty bucks Airporter fees back home and then another sixty bucks back tomorrow, hopefully.  A day of work missed for both of us.  For me it is just wages I would have earned if I worked today and left tomorrow.  But in Carol's case, she had a ton of stuff to do for work that she planned on getting done on the plane, but has done none of since she has been on the phone.  "Get your ass on the phone, and let your wife rest!," you scream.  I know, I keep trying.  She won't have it.  I can't rip the phone from her hands and tell her to take a load off.  She'd skin me alive.

I'm worried we aren't going to be on a plane tomorrow either.  Things aren't progressing in our favor. And our friends are waiting for us in Rio, but they are moving on to our other destinations with or without us.  But I'm even more worried about poor Carol.  She isn't just a trooper.  She's the whole friggin' army brigade.  She'll need more than this vacation to recover from this. Giving up isn't really an option. But she just can't seem to get them to put us on a new set of flights, much less get reparations for all the damage they've done.

Well, rant over. I'll let you know how it turned out. I have to go try to comfort my wife now. She is still on the phone.  It is 6:20.  So that's six hours of hell so far... Wish us luck.