For those of you not following my Twitter feed, I should have left DC this morning for sunny Silicon Valley, but my flight was canceled due to the SNOWPOCALYPSE. (Now with Thundersnow!)
Facts:
I bought the ticket via Orbitz.
It is a codeshare flight on USAirways operated by United Airlines.
There is 8″ of snow on my back deck and probably 12″ out at the airport.
Airport is 20+ miles outside of the city.
The problem began at 4pm yesterday when I looked at the airline flight status page. The flight before and after mine were both canceled, but my 8:30am flight was not. So I called Orbitz to find out why the flights were canceled. They were on the line with me with USAirways and United and the flights were canceled due to weather. Most likely because they couldn’t be certain that a plane would be there flying in from somewhere else. So the USAirways agent says to call back USAirways even if United cancels the flight because my ticket is on USAirways ‘ticket stock’. Well, people it’s electronic so it’s not on any paper stock, but I’ll use your arcane thinking for the hell of it.
At 7pm, I’m racing around the house. Boyfriend and I have decided that I should stay overnight by the airport. He has booked me a room with his hotel membership because he flies all the time for work. (He even gets to fly in a helicopter which makes me jealous but he says it makes him airsick. I don’t care, I want to be airsick in a helicopter BECAUSE IT’S A HELICOPTER!) Great! At 8pm, we’re about to leave when he suggests I check the flight status. And now the fun begins.
At 8pm, I start calling the airlines. I follow instructions and USAirways won’t pick up the phone. I get a busy signal, not even a hold message. So I call United, and I talk to a lovely rebooking agent who thinks I’m rebooked to Portland and ultimately to Shanghai. UH NO. I find this horribly funny because I’m trying to remain calm, after all, my flight isn’t till tomorrow and I can wait as late as Wednesday to fly out. A little homey staycation isn’t going to bother me. However, once we figure out I’m not Chinese, she tells me that I have to rebook with USAirways so onto hold I go with them.
By 9pm, my boyfriend has canceled the hotel room without a fee. (YAY!) But the small victories end there. I am now trying get on the phone with USAirways and they tell me that the flight is NOT canceled but boyfriend and I are looking at the USAirways website and he says that’s true, but the page I see says it’s canceled. The USAirways agent will do nothing, so I call Orbitz back for assistance. Well, they drop me onto the same USAirways hold line. I consider just taking the Metro to Reagan National and getting a ticket from the counter, but instead, I wait on hold for THREE AND A HALF HOURS till 12:15am. I’m seriously thinking that I will not get a flight out after everyone rebooks their flight and that bums me out.
After going to bed, I wake up around 8am and Orbitz is sending me flight status text messages which say that my gate has changed. WTF? I check the United website and it says the flight has been canceled, but USAirways says it isn’t. I’m freaking out. By 9am, I talk to an agent at USAirways and again, they see that it’s not canceled and will do nothing. They put me on the line with United. I am getting desperate. (BTW, that means ‘giving up hope’ in Latin, de-spero.)
But I finally get someone from United to take responsibility for helping me. I explain the situation and that I need help getting USAirways to pay attention to me. The agent understands that I am willing to wait till the storms blow out on Monday and fly out of a different DC airport because during the work week, DCA is better even if there I can’t get a direct non-stop to San Francisco. It’s going to take 45 minutes for the United agent to get a USAirways agent on the phone, so the United agent will call me back.
We’re not out of the woods yet. It’s been 30 minutes and she’s not yet called back. I hope I can get to CA. My alternative strategy is drive Christmas presents to Philadelphia so my parents can take their regularly schedule flight later in the week and for me to cancel my camping trip and stay home. If I can’t get rebooked today, flying standby later this week does not sound appealing at all.
Lessons learned?
1. During a weather cancellation, a ticket consolidator like Orbitz can do nothing for you, so don’t bother calling them.
2. Codesharing is complicated. If the operating airline cancels due to the weather, your ticketing airline has to do the re-booking.
3. If the operating airline says the flight is canceled but the ticketing airline does not, the best advice here is to make sure the operating airline contacts the ticket airline and communicates the true flight status. The computers at the ticketing airline may not update so you may end up with this run around if no one takes responsibility to communicate what is on the ground. Don’t let the ticketing airline’s agent be lazy! Make him/her research the actual flight status with the operating airline or the airport.
4. All hold music is terrible. Orbitz runs Pachabel’s Canon. United does Gershwin. USAirways has really, really wrong dramatic classical music or an advertisement. The first two wouldn’t be so bad if the recordings were decent, but they were so worn out/awful that I thought I was losing cellphone signal and the call was dropping out. USAirways’ huge gaffe was playing music with a highly dramatic finish with lots of violins. ZOMG, it just stirs you up physiologically while you’re already stressed out. Not good. They need to explore more mellow music. However, the deep irony in my head was that they could play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons but Spring movement only. Winter would have whipped me into a terrible ironic frenzy, the thought of which I found amusing in a sick way.
Wish me luck!
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m supposed to fly out of La Guardia tomorrow and I’m so dreading it. I can’t seem to catch a break; last year we were completely snowed in for two days after a snowstorm cancelled our flight out.
Good luck! This is why I don’t purchase code share flights. Earning frequent flier miles never seems to work, and the behind-the-scenes stuff is a nightmare if the slightest thing goes wrong. I’ve also recently discovered that Orbitz customer service is useless in general – it took 2 *hours* on hold for them to confirm that nothing had changed with my reservation, but no, they couldn’t explain why I can’t see it online any more.
Hahaha, I love the comment on the hold music. I hear that!
*sigh* I’d hoped it had gotten cleared up by now.
Sending you all the luck I can spare!