Yesterday I told you about all of the awesome things about my vacation last week. Puerto Rico is great, and everyone should go. Oh and eat some plantains, especially the yellow ones. They are super tasty. Anyway. My trip was great. Here is the less great part.
We got a phone call on Thursday morning at 2AM. It was a recording from American Airlines, saying that our flight home had been canceled and they rerouted us. Okay, what? First of all, 2AM is not my best time so it took a minute for the message to sink in. My half asleep thought process: what the heck, our flight’s been canceled? Why?? Are we stuck in Puerto Rico? Hey, that wouldn’t be so terrible…. And on that thought I fell back asleep.
Friday morning, I called into Aadvantage Customer Care to find out what’s going on. The deal was, our original flight from San Juan to DFW had been canceled because the “plane was being taken out of service.” Of course, my cynical mind wonders if that is code for “the flight wasn’t full so we canceled it.” But whatever. So they had rerouted us to….are you ready for it? JFK. So instead of our five hour flight to DFW and then our one hour flight home, with a total travel time of around seven hours, we were flying four hours to New York, waiting for four hours, then having another four hour flight home. For a total flying time of thirteen hours.
I know that this is way better than it could have been; we could have been stuck in San Juan longer, or had an overnight layover somewhere, or something. But seriously! Not the best way to end a vacation. The routing just confused me! New York is pretty much as far out of the way as you can get from Texas. Miami would have made more sense, or putting us on the later flight to Dallas. We thought we would be home by 2pm, and instead got home at 8pm. Lame.
But what can you do? I just kept focusing on those extra miles I was getting, and ignored how tired I was. Because even for me, that was a long flying day. And my poor husband is not used to such intense travel days, and he ended up getting sick. So even though we had a great vacation, we had a less great final day. Oh well.
oh, that’s the worst. i hate those calls from AA, and if it’s an automated message, you have to reply then and there if you ACCEPT the changes. i’ve learned to say NO and wait for a live person and ask what my other flight options are. i was once re-routed to atlanta via chicago when they could’ve just put me on a slightly earlier flight to DFW (there was still 2 hours before that flight) to make the original connection to ATL.
Why didn’t you ask for an alternate routing?
In the case of irops, you’re entitled to any reasonable routing, without regard to fare basis, if a seat is open in the cabin that you were sitting in on the irops’d flight. You need not accept the carrier’s initial proposal.
I would have been thrilled to be re-routed! More miles and compensation for my trouble! 🙂
I love the map! LOL
ditto loving the map. haha. way to be flexible RW!