No matter how much you plan, when you travel you have to always be ready to pivot. Weather, overbooking, equipment issues: any of them can derail your carefully crafted itinerary. And while there is no good time on a journey to be hit with a ripple, this was perhaps the worst. I was about to board the first short feeder flight on my journey home from California when up popped an email that my second flight, the cross country leg, had been cancelled.
Having been in this situation before, I've learned that while the airline will automatically rebook you, the faster you move the more options you have. Otherwise, while they will eventually reroute you, it is rarely the most efficient way. In practice that likely meant that, without my intervention, by the time I landed some computer would have assigned me a 3-stop routing via Miami that got me home a week later.
I stepped out of line, pulled up the app, scanned the available alternatives and picked one. It whirred and spun, then blinked and came back: no longer available. I tried another with the same result. A third and a fourth also came up blank. As I suspected it was a race, and I was losing. Finally, a hit. True, it added another leg westward before turning around, landed the next morning vs. that night, and got me into JFK vs. Newark where my car was parked. But it was better than nothing.
Once on board and connected to wifi I was able to keep trolling alternatives, but none of the automatically generated ones were better. I saw some other possibilities but they would require a human to override the system. So when I landed, I hurried to the service line, joining at least 30 people in front of me. I also punched the chat button on the app, and to complete the trifecata, dialed the assistance line. I plugged my phone into my backup battery and inched forward in the line.
Twenty or so minutes later the chat line came to life. Sanjit in India took my info and quizzed the system. No, it didn't look like he could do any better; he suggested the in-person agents (now just 10 people away from me) might have better luck. Another twenty minutes and this time it was my call broke that through. I explained my situation to Mike, who tapped into his terminal. As he was doing that I was called up. Ellen the gate agent stared at me and said "You gonna talk to me for them?" I replied "I'm on with one of your people! Do you have better access than they do?" She shrugged her shoulders as Mike came back on to say he could do nothing. Good riddance Sanjit, farewell Mike: Ellen, you are my last hope.
She keyed in my info, but in the interim other possibilities had evaporated. I tried one last Hail Mary: there was a flight down the concourse to JFK leaving in 10 minutes: could I standby on that? Sold out, of course, but sure, I could standby. But only the gate could actually confirm if they had seats. She added my name to the list, and off I ran.
When I got there they were making final boarding announcements and tagging extra bags, but the gate agent took my info and punched it in. Whether due to my status or tickets or a wink from the airline gods, my name was at the top of the list. She scribbled a note on a strip of scrap paper and told me to wait. She went down the ramp and disappeared into the plane while I cooled my heels. A few moments later she came back, worked her terminal, then handed me a boarding pass. I knew I was tempting fate, but asked her what she done. She looked at me like I was an idiot, then said, "I went on and looked if we had any empty seats."
An app. An agent in India. A call center in Dallas. An agent mid-concourse. And it still came down to a single person walking onto the plane and counting heads. For all the technology and remote access and cloud computing, sometimes you just have to be there.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford has on balance had few major travel mishaps. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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