Not going to get home tonight

[netmouse]

I have had a very nice time at Apollocon. They have treated us very well, including arranging for us to have a hotel room tonight, seeing as how after a 5-hour delay Continental failed to have a flight crew to fly our plane to Detroit, and canceled that flight, and we just came back to the hotel. I don't know WHEN we're returning to Detroit. I didn't feel like standing in line for two hours to find out/argue about it.

I am never ever EVER flying on Continental again. I have never seen an airline do such a poor job of informing both its passengers and its ground staff as to what was going on, nor have I ever seen an airline fail to be able to rebook people off a canceled flight through associated airlines. So far as I know we're currently booked to go home Tuesday and calling Continental was no help in finding a better solution. They had flights going to Dallas tonight that had space and I'm pretty sure we could have gotten home from Dallas tomorrow but they wouldn't shift anyone from anywhere other than the Guest Services desks with those lines two hours long because so many flights were messed up or canceled.

Anyway, I have had my second warm Doubletree cookie of the weekend and I am going to bed. I will deal with the rest of it tomorrow.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yipes!

Curiously enough, your post was right underneath dreamshark's post about AirTran stranding her adult son in Atlanta, saying they can't get him home for three days!

sethb is stuck in New York overnight. ybmcu ended up flying to Philly with plans to take the train from there after his 2:30pm flight from Dayton ended up turning into a 6:30pm flight that I can only now report finally left at 12:02 am. Once he made it to Philly, they found him on a seat on a plane so he didn't have to take the train after all. He's the luckiest one of the lot of you, if one can call that sort of travel headache "luck."

It sounds like a horrible day for air travel. This afternoon's thunderstorms had their intense moments, but didn't seem lasting enough to cause as much chaos as has been reported.

I had an experience similar to yours but with United in 2005. It was a holiday weekend, which limited their options, but the real problem was structural. Their procedures weren't working, and communication was badly broken, too.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

P.S. Sleep well tonight and good luck tomorrow!

Good on ApolloCon.

[elizilla]

Sounds like the adventures I had last year. My Friday night flight got canceled, along with everything else at the airport, due to a slush-storm in New England. Northwest's phones had a recording saying "Due to call volume please go to our website" and their website had a message saying "Can't rebook you, please call us on the phone." So I just went to a hotel. In the morning, the roads were clear and I went to the airport. I waited my two hours in line to find out that Northwest couldn't get me a flight home for almost a week. Then I went back to the Avis counter and rented a car to drop off at Detroit Metro. I was home twelve hours later.

Air travel is a mess. They can't reliably get us where we're going, on the promised schedule, without making our lives hell. Since the stranding and delaying is so frequent, I've adopted a strict policy of booking on nonstop flights only. That way it's a lot harder for them to strand me in random third cities where I have nowhere to go and nothing to do.