award tour

You might have noticed that awardtour has been pretty slim on posts for the last 2 weeks. I forgot to put a “closed for the holidays” sign up on awardtour while I was back in Canada for Christmas. As most of you know, I haven’t had much luck flying back to seattle lately. Well, 2007 didn’t start off too well either.

My original flight was Toronto > Denver > Seattle. Unfortunately, my flight was an hour late leaving Toronto. First, they had to switch planes and which made us just over 30 minutes late. Then we sat on the plane for almost 30 minutes waiting for catering which had gone to the old gate. It’s funny to think that I missed my connection in Denver because of a late catering truck on an airline that doesn’t even give you food. So I arrived in Denver having missed my connection by a mile. As luck would have it, there was only 1 more flight from Denver to Seattle that night and it was all sold out. I was put on standby but wasn’t lucky enough to get on it. When I went to the ticketing agent afterwards I learned flying lesson #1 of the night. It turned out that United didn’t have my Star Alliance status in their computers. The agent told me that had they known, I probably would have gotten on the previous flight. Lesson Learned: Always present your status.

This is where things start to look ugly. Since the next day was January 2nd, every flight was sold out and overbooked. At that time, there was basically no flight that United could put me on for the 2nd that would get me to Seattle. One option was to fly to San Francisco and play the same game but I opted for a ticket to Seattle for the 3rd and getting on the standby lists for the 2nd.

This meant I got to sleep in Denver for the night. It should be noted that Denver’s airport is in the middle of NOWHERE. It’s like 10 miles from the outer suburbs of Denver. The danky Comfort Inn that I was put up in was even further in the middle of nowhere. The only other buildings near the hotel was a McDonalds and restaurant that was joined to a truck-stop gas station. As you can imagine, every item sold at the truck stop contained large quantities of meat. I was dining with Rohit, a Waterloo Microserf whom I met along the way, who was also vegetarian. When he asked if he could get the enchiladas with no meat the waitress said “sure, we can take out the meat… do you want the chicken in it?”. Enough said. The low point of the night was hit when I found out that the restaurant sold no alcohol, the gas station sold no beer, and the hotel had no bar.

At the truck stop, Rohit informed me that he spoke to someone who managed to get a Denver > San Francisco > Seattle ticket confirmed for the next day. So I called up United and got through to someone in under 2 minutes and got a new ticket within 5 minutes. This is in contrast to people who waited in line for probably over an hour to talk to an agent to get a ticket. Lesson Learned: If you need to get ticketed while at an airport just call the airline.

I woke up the next day around 8am and decided I’d just go to the airport and hopefully get on an earlier flight to Seattle on stand-by. I spoke to an agent and she informed me that people with missed connections would take priority over me. I had to explain that I had missed a connection the day before. It turns out that United just thought that I bought a one-way ticket from Denver to Seattle because I was re-ticketed. Lesson Learned: Tell the ticketing agent everything every time.

Anyways, I got back to Seattle in one piece. So, that’s where I’ve been.