May 6th, 2010: A Day That Will Live in Infamy

‘A’s surgery is complete, our tickets to Moscow are booked, and everything looks like it is a go.

Right? Wrong.

After booking the plane tickets, Alan kept an eye on our reservations. The initial email confirmation from Cheap Tickets was correct, but the trip itinerary that LOT Polish Airlines showed was missing the segment from Warsaw to Moscow. The next morning, things got worse.

8:30 am: Cheap Tickets updated their itinerary to match LOT. Our trip was now a one-way flight, with a five-day layover in Warsaw. Further investigation online showed that the flight we had been booked on, was no longer available. For the next 2 ½ hours, Alan had to stay on hold with Cheap Tickets while they attempted to contact LOT, while still teleconferencing in to many work meetings.

11:00 am: All itinerary issues were resolved.

11:45am: Kathy calls Alan to let him know that new information had arrived. Even though the recovery time for ‘A’s surgery was five days, the Russian government mandates that orphaned children stay in the hospital for two weeks following surgery. ‘A’ would not be at the orphanage in time for our trip, so our trip was delayed by approximately two weeks.

12:45 pm: After approximately 60 minutes of swearing, Alan begins the process of cancelling the reservations he had just worked to get corrected. Surprisingly, cancelling the flights and getting an (almost) complete refund takes much less time than it did to correct the original itinerary.

7:00 pm: With the new itinerary in hand, Alan is able to book new flights to Moscow. In a stroke of luck, the new tickets cost less, have one less layover, and feature an overnight stay in Amsterdam, one of the more interesting cities in the world.

So after all of the stress of the day, it turned out that the change in plans was a good thing. On Friday, news reports started coming out that the Icelandic volcano was spewing ash again, causing most flights to be diverted to a more southern flight path. The addition of 2 hours of transatlantic flight would have caused us even more headaches, as we had only a 1hr 10minute layover in Warsaw.