Home Sweet Home (aka Airline Chaos)

It's so good to finally be home! I was in Houston for business this week with three of my co-workers and we was supposed to be back home yesterday afternoon, but it ended up taking an extra 24 hours to finally arrive thanks to the airlines. We wrapped up our meetings a little early on Thursday and got to the airport two hours before our flight, checked in, went through security and proceeded to our gate to wait for our flight. For once we weren't rushed and were able to relax before our flight. We should have known things were going too smoothly for us.

While sitting at the gate my cell phone rang. It was an alert that my flight had been delayed one hour. I wasn't too happy about that, but what's an hour in the grand scheme of things, right? About half an hour later my phone rang again. My flight was delayed a second hour. We looked up at the board by the gate and they had just updated it for the first delay, and not the second delay. We now had three hours to kill, so we decided to get some drinks and munchies since we weren't sure when we'd eat again. While sitting there my cell phone went off again, alerting me to a third delay. Now we were leaving three hours past our original departure time and wouldn't be arriving home until around midnight. We chatted and decided that none of us would be in the office bright and early on Friday since we'd be getting home so late after a long day. We continued to munch and chat and one co-worker asked me for help getting into the airline's web site via his Blackberry. He was fiddling around and then announced that the web site said our flight had been cancelled. I didn't get a phone call for the cancellation - only the delays.

We decided to first check down at the gate to see if that was correct. We arrived and our flight was no longer displayed on the sign at the gate. We looked at the monitors and it wasn't listed there either. Not even a mention of it with the word 'cancelled' next to it. Then someone told us they were just displaying obsolete information and none of it was correct. By then people were asking questions and the gate agents claimed they had no information about any cancellations. People were lining up, so we went back through security and to the main check-in counter where there were no lines. We gave the agent our boarding passes and she booked two of us on a flight home via Chicago and two of us on a flight via Dallas for early the next morning with a different carrier. We asked where checked baggage was and we were told it was on carousel five. Well, when we got there, there were hundreds of bags from all the cancelled flights piled in a huge heap. Yep - they cancelled all of their flights from Houston at the same time and just put all the bags together instead of separating them by flight. Once we found our bags, we started scrambling to find hotel rooms before they started to sell out. The first few places were sold out, but we were able to get rooms ten minutes from the hotel. We grabbed a cab and went and checked in right away and then met back up an hour later to find somewhere to get some dinner.

Our first flight was at 7 a.m., so we got up at 4 a.m. and caught a shuttle to the airport at 5 a.m. When we arrived, the lines for our original airline were already out the door. We went to our new carrier and checked in. The two of us going via Chicago were confirmed to Chicago but were told we had to reconfirm our connecting flight once we got to Chicago. That made us a little nervous, but we would have more options once we got to Chicago and could drive back to Detroit if necessary. The two who were going via Dallas were told they had to be rebooked by the original carrier, so they had to go wait in that long line and then were bounced back and forth between the two carriers for well over an hour. Seems they had been booked on flights for a previous day somehow. Not sure how that happened, but they finally got on a flight leaving at 9 a.m.

The Chicago flight took off on time and landed on time, so things were finally looking up! We got to our connecting gate in plenty of time, checked in, and were confirmed an assigned seats. We were almost there! And then the plane didn't show up. We finally got another plane sent over to handle our flight and boarded the plane about an hour late. All systems were go, and then a flight attendant told me I was in the wrong seat. Nope - my boarding pass said 14B and that's the seat I was in. Funny, but another passenger also had a boarding pass with seat 14B. That delayed things, but possession is 9/10ths of the law and I was allowed to keep my seat. I had been getting a bit worried there for a minute. We thought everything was set, but then a head count revealed there were ten more people on the flight than their manifest showed. How could that be? So, they read off the names of passengers who hadn't checked in yet to see if they were on the plane. I was the first name read off. They couldn't understand how I could be sitting on the flight when I hadn't checked in. I had... and my boarding pass was scanned when I got on the plane. They read off several more names, and we were all on the flight. So, they came and collected our boarding passes and went away for almost an hour to try and reconcile the manifest since according to their records we weren't on the plane. They finally decided that we did exist and were on the plane and we were cleared for take-off.

Upon arriving home we were in a different terminal and had to find a shuttle to get to the terminal where our cars were parked. I was so tired of shleping my bag by then and I have never been so glad to see my car. I realized I was starving (at this point I hadn't eaten in over eight hours since they don't even give you pretzels these days) and went through a drive-thru on the way home. It was so good to get home and I'm looking forward to getting a good nights sleep in my own bed.

And people wonder why I say I don't like traveling for work...