Day Seven of the Honeymoon
Some Harsh Language Ahead. Consider Yourself Warned.
9/10/2016
Well, some say there’s no rest for the weary and that is certainly how I’m feeling at this point. Woke early, showered, and did my morning routine while Nicole freshened up. We took our time condensing our luggage from three bags to two. Afterward, we headed down to the common area and had a bite or two to eat. We bopped over to the parking garage, picked up the car, and moved it closer in preparation to load it up with our 70-pound
We bopped across the parking lot, visited Target for an audio jack splitter, and pictures with the Pokeball out front. A few minutes later and we’d meandered our way back to the hotel, checked out, and moved our bags from the room to the car.
Our drive back to the airport was smooth and uneventful and dropping the car off was painless. It took us a short time to file into the waiting shuttle bus and only slightly longer to realize that the bus’s clock was half an hour fast.
We had a quiet chuckle and ten minutes later, a second chuckle when we brought relief to another family simply by telling them that the clock was fast and they weren’t about to miss their plane.
We went into the airport, stumbled around for a few minutes while trying to find the check in, and finally got to the counter. We were informed that our big bag (one we’d carefully packed with another bag inside it) was too heavy and subject to a massive fee unless we lightened it. We had expected that might happen, so we broke it down into two bags. What we hadn’t entirely anticipated was being charged an arm and a leg and promising our first-born child to the Frontier Airlines to bring bags that were carry on. While I understand there will be fees and the like, but being forced to check two more bags for a cost of a third of our TOTAL airfare (total roundtrip cost, mind you) seems a bit much.
If you get the opportunity to fly with Frontier, I thoroughly recommend you pass on the chance. After the headache of the check in counter, we made our way through security and marched on over to our departure gate a full two hours early. Initially.
We sat, listened to “World War Z” (great book, both audio and written, and I highly recommend it) and even did our good deed of the day by picking up a credit card someone had dropped and passed it along to the service counter. Not more than five minutes later, we had a gate change.
That was the second headache of Frontier. A minor one I’d normally be inclined to forgive. However, after changing gates, and without announcing it, they delayed the flight.
Then delayed it again.
A 1320 departure time became 1430, which turned into 1542. Two hours after our original departure time and approximately when we were supposed to arrive in Omaha.
At this point I got up and walked our terminal for a spell and came across some real live Pidgeys.
More waiting dragged the passage of time through the mud of patience. As 1500 crawled into place, Nicole noticed that the Frontier website had updated the gate once more from A38 to A40. We waited for a couple more minutes before we walked over to customer service and asked what was up.
The ladies at the desk were polite and informed us that our plane was grounded in Cincinnati with mechanical problems. They were trying to get it fixed and get the plane to Denver. Or decide to get us on a different plane.
*sarcasm alert* This truly put me at ease.*end sarcasm alert*
Then we asked about the gate change. At first, the ladies told us that there hadn’t been a gate change. A few moments later, they agreed with us and told us that there should be an announcement soon. We meandered back to the beleaguered, gathered masses, and told them what we’d learned.
The others began to become just as disgruntled as we were. After a few minutes of talking it over, there was an announcement over the PA that our departure gate had been changed once more.
We walked in a great herd over toward the new departure gate and found it thoroughly crowded. It was as though they were trying to make our wait even worse. The gate was scheduled to have two other flights depart from it (one scheduled before and one scheduled, initially, after ours). Nicole and I turned away and went to grab a bite to eat. After wandering the concourse for a brief time, we settled on going to Quizno’s.
Nicole ordered a sandwich and we stepped off to the side. A few minutes later, her sandwich was snatched up by an impatient jerk who didn’t listen to what number was actually called out. We caught the attention of one of the servers and told her what happened. She called out to have a second sandwich made, apologized, and gave us the other sandwich as well in compensation.
We thanked her and returned to the concourse and retreated upstairs to relax and wait in relative privacy. Nicole monitored the time and subsequent delays. We returned to the gate as we neared the one hour to go mark. We found two open seats and claimed them for ourselves.
At that point we watched the time delay get pushed back to 1643. At 1630, the delay changed to 1651 and a handful of minutes after that time had come and passed, the departure disappeared entirely from the screen. Mind you, by this point we’ve observed our plane sitting at the terminal for near an hour, but no boarding had commenced.
I immediately got up and checked the various screens depicting departures and found that our flight had been removed. Two other flights to Omaha (on different airlines) remained, but our happy flight had been removed. No official announcement was made.
I returned to my wife and sat, simmering in my grumpiness. A few more minutes of pointless waiting and the lady at the stand finally announced that our flight has been cancelled because, despite having four plus hours of delays, they couldn’t get a pilot to fly us back to Omaha. We were then told to proceed to Customer Service to review our options.
Yes, they sent an entire plane full (I’m guessing 50+ people) to a desk manned by 4 people, of which only 3 were actually doing anything.
There was a mad rush of everyone on the plane to the customer service desk one terminal over. I described it in a couple text messages to friends and my mother-in-law as “Flight Cancelled. Customer service is getting a riot crowd.”
We didn’t actually riot, but we did stand in line vocally grumpy with our nearest neighbors, for over an hour (can you see the theme of waiting for practically nothing here?). In the end, we did make a couple new friends and I’d like to give a shout out to them: Bianca: Glad you made it to Grand Island safe and sound. Brittany: sorry the airline didn’t give you any sort of transport away from the hotel they put you up in, hopefully the hotel was nice. Caitlyn (Kaitlyn?) your fireyness inspired us all. Paul, thanks for helping make our drive back to Omaha that much more entertaining, and helping foot the bill for gas/car rental. We’ll look you up if we’re ever in Vegas.
After waiting in line (we’d called customer service in the meantime, who promised we’d see a refund of ticket price and fees) to speak to a real live person, we were given an official line to file a complaint, information sheet, and $15 dinner credit which we milked for every drop.
On the information sheet we were promised a $200 flight voucher. We’ve yet to see any such voucher, but that might just require more waiting. There might be another phone call. (Update! It took three more phone calls to their customer service line to actually get them to issue the vouchers promised)
Our story doesn’t stop there, merely the shittiness (forgive my language, but hey… I warned you at the top) of the airline, mishandling of information, and customer direction. We traveled from the customer service desk to dinner (Schlotzsky’s), to baggage, to rental car place (involving another bus ride). We ended up in a Chrysler fancy-mobile with keyless ignition and overly complicated dome light extinguishing features (seriously, I still don’t know what I did to make it go out).
At least it drove smooth. Finally, at 1930, we were on our way home once more. We set out on I-75 east which eventually met up with I-80. We got to know Paul as we drove which made the trip a bit more bearable. In Kearney, Nebraska, we refilled the tank, emptied bladders, and sloughed on.
We rolled into Omaha, finally home, at 0230 (local time of 0330), dropped Paul off at his destination and came back to our house to pass out, exhausted and conscious for near on 24 hours. Our journey at an end, at least we can say we had quite the adventure to wrap up the final day of our honeymoon.
Next trip? We’re looking at England.
Hope you’ve enjoyed my journals and come back for more.
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