24 September 2023: 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.

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.