My flight back to Italy was canceled, I still went to the airport and avoided the worst
Imagine being ready to go to the airport at DCA in Washington to return to Italy via JFK, a flight [...]
American Airlines
DCA
Imagine being ready to go to the airport at DCA in Washington to return to Italy via JFK, a flight that takes less than 60 minutes and to 3 hours from departure you receive a notification, "Flight cancelled".
In this article:
You don't even have time to react that immediately you receive an email in which you are told that you have been reprojected And you will arrive at Malpensa 12 hours late. No longer at 8 p.m. but at 9 a.m. the next morning.
The best bonuses
Then However, you find that to go to JFK, you will not fly direct from Washington, but you will be forced to go through North Carolina and spend a night in Raleigh, the state capital, and that the itinerary is completely turned around and instead of doing DCA/JFK, JFK/LHR, LHR/MXP, you're going to do DCA/RDU, RDU/JFK and finally JFK/MXP and you will no longer fly with British Airways but everything with American Airlines.
It all sounds very nice, but there is one big however.. You have to confirm it and through the APP and you can't. BA's call center (who issued the ticket doesn't answer), American Express travel service is "asleep" since it's 2 a.m. in Italy, and AA's voicemail tells you the average wait is over 2 hours to get a response.
At this point I remembered the tale of our friend Stan and when, in the chaos of Munich., did not make the mistake of waiting and made the decision to go to the airport to save what could be saved.
The facts
A summer storm that hit New York City. forced airlines to cancel dozens of flights and delayed hundreds, if we combine this with the peak season period re-routing three passengers in business class was no easy feat.
This whole mess happened exactly 36 hours before the outbreak of the total blackout that paralyzed the world, in hindsight we were very lucky. We would have risked being stuck days.
At the airport what I was able to understand is. the only chance to get back with minimal delay, was the solution proposed by AA, too bad that without confirming the change we had no assurance that our seats would be there waiting for us.
When these problems happen so close to departure time, miscommunications are also generated such as BA warning us that at LHR our flight to the Silvio Berlusconi would leave late, even though we had not even left the U.S. yet and would not pass through London again.
How I behaved
Realizing that having remote assistance would be impossible or too risky, I decided to get a Lyft and take advantage of the fact that the Washington Reagan National Airport is on the other side of the Potomac River, 10 minutes or so from our hotel.
Here, when I arrived, absolute peace reigned, not even looking like a day in which more than 30 flights had been canceled by AA alone.
The friendly attendant looked at me with the face of someone who has never seen such a situation, and as a spectacular rainbow popped up outside, right on the tails of some AA planes, he tells me: "Figure if you have to go through RDU to go to JFK, I'll take care of it."
Moral of the story was not easy for him to come up with a solution either. In the process, he told me about his vacation between Rome, Florence, and the Tuscan hills and how his wife disliked Europe because "there is never enough air conditioning."
After more than 30 minutes he tells me, "How long does it take your family to be here? Tomorrow morning's flight from DCA to RDU will be canceled, if you want there is a delayed flight tonight that will leave at 9:50 pm instead of 8:25 pm. If they can make it this is the only way to fly to Italy tomorrow".
Which promptly occurred and which we saw in the monitors the next morning.
It was impossible to find 3 business seats to Malpensa until Saturday, which was 3 days beyond our scheduled return date, precisely because of the many cancellations due to bad weather.
Moral of the story in less than 20 minutes Marika and Bete were at the airport., I was able to make a quick jump in. the brand new Centurion Lounge and most importantly we were able to catch, in economy because there were no other seats, the flight to Raleigh.
In conclusion
Of course in the U.S. these solutions are much easier to manage because, unlike in Italy, the staff is in the company's 99% and not third-party companies such as airports and handling. This means that handlers have a better chance to get in touch with the right offices and especially to get their hands on the reservation, which would hardly happen in a similar situation in the old continent.
Also the flexibility that there is in American air transportation helped so much in these cases, in Italy or Europe everything is generally much more hygge, not to mention low-cost where it is a whole world even less open to handling certain situations.
I am sure that at 110%. If the same situation had happened to me on a VCE/FCO, FCO/JFK flight, I would not have been able to save the itinerary and would have ended up at the mercy of events, or I would have had to settle for a downgrade to economy.