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Monday, April 14, 2008
Flying is for the birds!
I guess we should have all saw it coming. The airlines are starting to fall from the sky and the delays in airports around the world are becoming more and more nonsensical, not to mention a pain in the you know where.
And my ever-growing fury of flying officially began the day my mother-in-law was supposed to arrive in Grand Junction from Michigan. As you’ll soon learn, that day was a double-whammy for us.
My mother-in-law was scheduled to arrive for a weeklong stay on Friday, April 4. She had booked this flight months in advance. Kelley and I were both eager to pick her up at the airport, but of course at the last minute, my wife calls me and tells me her mother won’t be coming - the airline booked too many passengers and because no one wanted to volunteer to sit that flight one out, Linda and two others were selected to be bumped.
Although my mother-in-law was compensated with money and vouchers to fly in the future, it’s the principle of the matter, which irked us all. As soon as we were able to calm down and digest the new schedule, my wife got an email from our travel agency with even more bad news - the airline we were flying to Hawaii in July had just gone bankrupt and closed its doors.
ATA airlines, which was our connecting flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii, sent out a mass email and took down its Web site Thursday, April 3. It did this while its last flights were still en route. The email we received suggested we call one of four provided airlines in an attempt to re-route us to Hawaii, which was supposed to be our belated honeymoon.
So my wife and I were using two separate phones trying to piece back what was once a trouble-free puzzle. We were told by each airline we called we would have to pay an additional $200 per person, per flight. In other words, from Denver to L.A., to Hawaii would have ended up costing up another $800 on top of the thousands we had already spent. The bigger problem was we would have had to arrive two days later and come home a day earlier. Thus, we ultimately canceled our trip and to our amazement, got a full refund.
Since then, I have been glued to the news when it comes to the airlines. Because of the rising fuel costs, inspections on planes or whatever - flying has rapidly become more of an inconvenience than a convenience. For this reason and this reason only, my wife and I have decided to hop in the car in July and head West. We’ll take our time, enjoy the scenery and will be free from the migraine that is flying - once the easiest way to travel.
By the way, getting back to Michigan was more difficult than arriving in Colorado for my mother-in-law. Her return flight was canceled twice. It gave us all four extra days together, but assured our collective judgment that flying is for the birds.
