Travel Nightmare

What do you do when you live the worst day of your life? Blog about it, of course! After I tell you this story, you will probably realize my life has been extremely well up until this point! Now, to the story…

My story begins when we arrive at Heathrow to discover our flight from Heathrow to Calgary has been delayed by three hours. We talked to an agent there about rescheduling the second leg of our journey (from Calgary to San Francisco) for a later time. They told us we would be helped with this once we arrive in Calgary. They also told us to talk to the flight attendants when we were about an hour away from Calgary and they could help us. Now fast forward to us being on the flight. The take off was fine and immediately they started serving a meal, which is totally usual. When the flight attendants were about done serving the meal, we hit turbulence and the pilot came on saying that all the flight attendants needed to be seated and the meal service ended. After this, we endured three hours of hell. This translates into three hours of turbulence, complete with much vomiting (not on mine or Ian’s part, but most of the other passengers) and the isles cluttered with our meal that was still in front of us. If anyone tried to get out of their seats, they immediately yelled over the loudspeaker for everyone to remain seated. At one point, they actually announced that once we ran out of barf bags, we were to use the bags our blankets came in. Are you kidding me?!? What was quite weird to me was how calm everyone remained throughout this experience. You could here the occasional crying and tons of vomiting, but no one was speaking or being hysterical. You may think I am being a little dramatic, but I kind of thought our plane wasn’t going to make it. I have never been through anything like this and neither had the flight attendants (which is always reassuring). Anyway, the turbulence finally ended and the cabin got semi cleaned up. The smell of vomit never left throughout the entire flight. I think they are going to have to steam clean that plane!

Now fast forward to about an hour before our plane is supposed to land…which it is now due to land 30 minutes before our connection departs (let me remind you that we originally gave ourselves 4 hours between flights). Ian asks the flight attendant about our connection, who gets annoyed with him for asking and lets him know that many people are in the same situation as us, and we will just have to wait until we land to deal with it. Just before we land, we are told an agent of Air Canada (I say the name so you NEVER fly with them after my awful experience) will meet us at the gate to help up. We land, get off the plane, and there is no agent in sight. So we proceed thru passport control and wait for our baggage. At baggage claim, we are told there will be an agent just outside of customs to help us. Of course, we exit out of customs and there once again is no agent in sight. Seeing on the departures board that our flight has already taken off, we get into a line that is helping people who missed their transfers. We know there is another flight two and a half hours later and are hoping to be on it. We wait in this line for 45 minutes, only to be told that this desk only deals with domestic flights and we need to go upstairs. So, once again, we join another long line. At one point, we were told this was the wrong place for us to be helped and they tried to refer us to the place we had just come from, but we refused to move. Finally, we get to an Air Canada agent who is willing to help us, only to be told that not only was the flight out that night full, but all the flights on Christmas Eve were full as well. But, since Ian had already called AmEx travel, we knew there were first class seats still available for Christmas Eve. So, we mentioned this to the agent. She lets us know that since the flights tomorrow are on United (which is actually who our tickets were through), she couldn’t upgrade us. But, I convinced her to book the tickets for us and that we would go down and work it out with United. So, on to another line. At first I thought the agent at United wasn’t going to be helpful, but she quickly turned around. After I told her I refused to go on the long standby list for Christmas Eve, only to then be stuck in Canada for Christmas, she gave us the first class tickets, making us promise not to tell anyone else (you have to remember that many people on our flight from London missed the same connection we missed). So, happily we accepted the tickets. We once again called AmEx to get the details of our travel insurance (loving AmEx right now, by the way) and headed to a local hotel.

Now here I am right now, sitting in my first class seat to San Francisco, on a flight that took off almost two hours late. But, I know I will make it home for Christmas and that’s all that matters, right? I had to cancel my Christmas Eve shopping plans with my mom and don’t have any presents for anyone yet, but I am glad that I will soon be home and get to squeeze my family and tell them how much I love them and am glad to see them….awww, the joys of Christmas!