| May. 27th, 2008 @ 04:33 pm a cautionary tale |
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(oh yeah, i'll preface this by saying my work-trip to Spain was awesome. stories & pics coming soon.)
beware of airlines! their computers are not very smart. :P
last Wednesday i flew from Toronto to Madrid on a connecting flight through Newark. when i arrived at the airport for the the Toronto-Newark leg, the flight was already delayed and was going to be leaving Toronto about an hour late. there was a good chance that this would make me miss my connection to the Newark-Madrid flight, so the agent helpfully made a tentative reservation for me on a second Newark-Madrid flight that would be leaving later that evening, in case i didn't make the first one.
got to Newark and made a mad dash (wheee!) through the airport, arriving at the gate just in time to board the Newark-Madrid flight i'd originally been booked on. even more miraculously, my luggage also made it. :)
and then i thought no more of it until yesterday, when it was time to come home.
i arrived at the airport in Madrid to find out that they had no booking for me on the return flight.
because on the trip out, when i'd failed to turn up for the *later* Newark-Madrid flight (already being happily somewhere over the North Atlantic eating quasi-hydrated mystery meat and battling with my seatmate for armrest supremacy), the system considered me a "no-show" and automatically cancelled the return leg of my trip. somehow this over-rode the fact that somewhere in the system there must have been a record that i *had* indeed boarded one of those two planes and had made it to Madrid after all.
thankfully, the lovely helpful agents in Madrid were able to sort things out and get me home on the flights i was originally supposed to have been on - luckily, neither flight was booked up.
but still. it's a little distressing that the agent who originally set this whole sorry train of events in motion didn't warn me that this might happen, and even more disturbing that there was no notification from the airline when they just went ahead and cancelled a flight i still needed.
so yeah, just thought y'all should know - watch out for airlines and their depressingly stupid machines. :P :) |
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