You Had a Bad Day...

I hear the American Idol music. Yes, I am totally lame for associating that song only with American Idol. I know it had roots before that... but it's what comes into my mind.

Last night I got an email from my agency saying I needed to change my flight arrangements to return home a day later. The courier taking my papers to Moscow and back won't be "back in Vlad" until the morning after I leave. In my humble opinion, there is a LOT of down time in his schedule and it would have been MUCH easier to change 1 ticket than 3. But who am I...

So I checked with my travel agent - who has been a godsend, mind you. Her email last night was "no problem, basically $100 change fee for each and availability looks good". Got the official word from the agency this morning and I emailed the travel agent to pull the trigger on the date change. Small inconvenience to my dad & Sharon who were planning on driving up to Atlanta to see us as we landed - but no big deal, right? WRONG!

Lynn, the travel agent, emails back this morning that somehow overnight now the flight returning into Atlanta on 3/29 is FULL in our fare class. No availability. Huh? It's much easier (and cheaper) to only change dates vs. changing routing cities, but that's what we had to do. Here comes the fun.

I had used my points on NORTHWORST Air (sorry Danette, you know I have always been a fan til now) to upgrade to first class from Detroit to Chicago on my flight leg. Somehow when I did that, Northworst took control of my ticket - which means my travel agent can no longer make changes herself. HUH??? On top of that -- they want to charge me $1300 to make the change. Little T's fee would be $300 and Rhonda's would be a little over $230. But because they took control of my ticket - Lynn can't access it. She called Northworst and got the run around, so she asked me to call them. It got worse from there. The man was SO rude to me, basically yelled at me for using a travel agent and said "that's why you should have booked through us". Literally, and I mean LITERALLY, he had me bawling on the phone. Wow. That's some serious customer service, people.

He wanted to make my changes, but my tickets are tied to Little T and Rhonda. The whole point is that we are TOGETHER. And on top of it, I didn't know which flights we were being moved to because nothing had been confirmed yet.

Lynn ended up saving the day and getting the changes done on my ticket for $650 - so the total changes will only cost me around $1100 NOT $2000. But the BEST part is that if anything happens mid-trip (weather delays etc) Northworst has to make all my changes, Korean Air can't, Lynn can't etc. Mighty handy for when a girl's in Russia, eh? I am so fuming mad at Northworst I can't see straight. Please pray for no hiccups along the way!!!

I am going to start collecting soda cans on the street to pay for my changes now...