Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Fiasco

Yesterday I ran into a few complications at the Philadelphia airport: my connecting flight in Chicago was canceled. Now, my friend Kim (who so kindly housed me during my trip) told me that Philadelphia was notoriously known for bad customer service. I must admit that this is true, and was perhaps the only thing that I disliked regarding the city's people.

Anyway, I actually received decent help from the woman at the counter of Southwest airlines. She wanted to try to find me a "direct" flight from Philly to Los Angeles, with one stop either at Phoenix or Las Vegas. But due to inclement weather (and the few direct flights from Philly to LA), all the flights were either booked full or had to go through Chicago. See the problem was that a snow/ice storm came through the mid-west, delaying or canceling all the flights in and out of Chicago. Fine, there's nothing I can do to control the weather. After about five minutes of the woman trying to help me, I started stressing out a lot. I honestly didn't care about having two connecting flights because I wanted to get out of Philly as soon as possible, especially when the weather reports stated that there would be possible snow fall later in the day (and having more flights delayed). Yet the woman at the check-in counter kept trying to insist that I have a direct out of Philly at 2:00 pm. I politely declined. First, I know that Southwest is notorious for being late. Second, I was not going to stay an additional five and a half hours to get a direct flight home. Third, seeing how the flight was leaving at 2:00 in the afternoon, I did not want to end up with the possibility of being stuck in Philly. So finally after twenty minutes, she found a flight for me to go into Houston, and from Houston to Los Angeles. Of course, with my luck so far yesterday, Houston was experiencing delays as well due to Thunderstorms. Just my luck right? Right.

Here was the list of my alternative flights:
Philadelphia to Orlando, Orlando to Los Angeles.
Philadelphia to Nashville, Nashville to Kansas City, Kansas City to Los Angeles
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Los Angeles

The departure times ranged everywhere and anywhere between 9:30 am to 2:00 pm. It just didn't matter at that point because I was just going to have to face the awful weather sweeping the midwest and southwest and even the gulf coast states. And I didn't want to "arrive" in Los Angeles at 7:00 p.m. (this is if there were no delays what-so-ever). In the end I opted to fly into Texas because my "arrival time" was at 4:00 pm. I figured that I could give myself about 2.5 - 3 hours worth of delay time, and still be back in the City of Angels for a decent dinner hour.

And so my trip to Philly ended up stressful the very last day, but I am alive and well, albeit a bit tired.

2 comments:

Dr J said...

a potential stopover in chicago and yet not a word to me? oh that hurts. even with our sucky weather, that hurts

Zug zug said...

Hey! I told you back during the Holidays! And I told you that my lay-over would be two hours. Then you proceeded to tell me not to step a foot outside the airport.

Anyway, I am thinking of flying out in the spring perhaps. This Angeleno is in dire need of seeing the mid-west. Well okay, just Chicago.