Big wins in little battles

September was significant for two major customer service stories in our preparations for our international senior nomad travel planning process. One of them actually took place over several months but finally got resolved over the past week.

Random flight adjustments

The first experience I learned some caution from. We booked our flights to Panama City in June to fly in November. For a variety of factors I chose to book a flight with 2 layovers. I hate flying, primarily because of the ‘sitting in one place for hours at a time’ part of it. I had an option to fly PDX-DFW-MIA-PTY with 4 hour layovers at DFW and MIA pretty cheaply so I went for it. Booked through Expedia because I’ve never had any issues with them before.

Ah, but this time… THIS time…. We had some issues. In July and August there were a couple flight change notifications. No big deal, typically; airlines adjust their schedules all the time. One of the changes gave us a negative 29 minute layover over at Miami so I had some concerns. I mean, if our MIA-PTY flight is scheduled to depart 29 minutes before our DFW-MIA flight lands…. Not for sure how they were going to incorporate time travel into the process… But it got adjusted the next day to allow for 50 minutes at MIA. No harm, no foul.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Expedia to check our PDX departure time and there wasn’t one. There was literally no record of us having the PDX-DFW flight; it just showed us leaving DFW for Miami then on to PTY.

Okay, well, time travel was ruled out so now I guess it was teleportation? Huh.

I spent about 40 minutes on the phone with Expedia ( Do Not recommend, LOL) and eventually was told that they ‘no longer had control’ of my tickets and I needed to contact the airline directly. Merde.

I lucked out and got an absolutely fabulous agent at American Airlines – Jade. It took a few minutes for her to grasp the entirety of the situation. I was explaining and she was typing but her eventual understanding came with a ‘They did what? Oh. No. Now you hold on I need to look something else up’

It was about 10 minutes of her trying different lookups – she was really good at letting me know what was going on – before she explained what she found. In the process of changing flight times, at some point there was no way my PDX-DFW flight would arrive in time to make the DFW-MIA connection so they just dropped it from the itinerary. Tickets existed for a 6 a.m. departure out of DFW to MIA then on to PTY arriving at nearly the same time as my original schedule.

After my explaining that the departure time was totally unimportant, what mattered was that we arrive in Panama City on the 15th, she found an earlier flight PDX-MIA that connected to the original MIA-PTY flight. Not super excited about the whole ‘PDX-MIA’ part due to the length of the flight but at least we got exit row aisle seats so I can stand up occasionally.

Healthcare shouldn’t be so stressful

The second customer service issue to get resolved this month actually started in February. I’ve been on C-PAP therapy since 2015 due to obstructive sleep apnea. In February this year my C-PAP machine started making unsatisfactory noises. Loud, distracting ‘keeping the wife awake’ noises. I took it in to the distributor to have it looked at and after keeping it overnight they decided they was nothing wrong with it. Well, there IS definitely something wrong with it. Some minutes of discussion about how to get it replaced led me to believe the system is borked.

Agent “It’s outside the 5 year warranty so you’ll have to contact your insurance company”

Me “Yeah, let’s file that under ‘things that probably won’t happen’ but what does the rest of that process look like”

Agent “You’ll have to get a new prescription”

Me “Because…?”

Agent “The one we have on file is too old”

Me “Right. Because obstructive sleep apnea frequently self-resolves so it makes sense that the prescription would expire.”

Agent “…..”

Me “Okay, well as long as I’m here let’s talk about my getting a travel C-PAP since the regular machine would be a total hassle to carry around the world with us.”

Agent “Insurance won’t cover a travel machine”

Me “Okay, can I just buy one?”

Agent “They cost about $1,000”

Me “Okay, let’s assume that’s not a gating issue”

Agent “……”

Me “If I had $1,000 and wanted to buy one, how would I do that?”

Agent “You’d need a prescription.”

Me “aaaaggghhhhh”

Agent “We’ve also been having some supply chain issues so it might take 3 or 4 months to get one.”

Sooooo, off I went to pursue that process. Slowly, because, well, procrastination is a problem for me. I eventually got in touch with the sleep center where I was originally diagnosed and they told me that my prescription was expired because they are only issued for one year. Sure. Because, again, obstructive sleep apnea frequently self-resolves. <sigh>

I could get a new prescription. All I needed was a referral from my doctor and to go through the sleep study again so my insurance would cover the cost of the machine.

“If you give a mouse a cookie….”

In researching options someone told me that they had gotten a new prescription from their PA and got the travel machine that way. Hmmm, that sounds like it has possibilities, I needed to schedule my annual visit with my cardiologist anyway.

Seemed easy enough, PA said she wasn’t sure exactly how to write it up since it was outside her purview but she was pretty sure her nurse could work it out with the distributor to get the details right.

Two weeks and multiple fruitless phone calls later put the lie to that idea. Total wasted time thus far? Maybe 10 or 12 hours over a couple of months.

Auntie Google to the rescue. Turns out that you can do the whole thing online. I paid $35 and filled out an amazingly comprehensive survey, spent a couple minutes on a video chat with a doctor, got an email an hour later confirming my prescription was added to my profile and 3 days later the new machine was delivered to the house. Total time used – about an hour.

You might also be interested in our post “Prescription Refills – Planning an extended period overseas? What You Need To Know About Prescription Refills Abroad“