BOUGHT TICKETS
Late last night I bought two tickets from Asheville to Amsterdam using Google Flights and the Delta Airlines app. I spent from 7 p.m. to midnight on line, first waiting and then talking to two different Delta agents, the first in Mexico and the second in South Africa. This second agent was in a room filled with agents chattering so loud that I could barely hear the woman who was helping me.
In the old days to book flights you had to go to a travel agent and both pay the agent a commission and trust that you were getting the best deal. Now it is much simpler, you can do it all by yourself on line. But it turns out that that isn’t so simple after all. First you have to find for yourself the tickets that seem to be cheapest. That includes checking the cost of leaving from the local airports—Asheville, Greenville, Knoxville and the cost of flying from each of these places to airports in Europe—Hannover, Hamburg, Berlin and Amsterdam. The price for each day from and to each airport is different and changes day by day. The prices rose from Sunday to Monday and then again on Tuesday while we were still deciding what we were going to do.
When on Tuesday I felt that I had found the best flight, from Asheville to Amsterdam with a final train ride to Celle, I phone Delta. I wanted to pay for Susie’s ticket with Delta miles with an added cost of $127 for taxes and fees, and for my ticket wanted to use the ecredit from the flight to Rome that I cancelled in October.
The guy in Mexico was very friendly and helpful and completely misled me. According to him to combine paying for both our tickets we would have to leave at 5:40 in the morning, getting to the airport by 3:30 and spending 10 hours in Atlanta rather than leaving at 9:45 and spending 6 hours in Atlanta. He processed my ticket, charging $510 added to the ecredit and then told me that instead of using 53,200 Delta Miles for Susie’s ticket which is what the Delta App had told me that I would have to use 150,000 miles which I didn’t have. He claimed that the number of Delta miles required had shot up in the hour since I had looked at the Delta app. Happens all the time he said. This had taken two hours, I was stymied, and gave up completely discouraged. It appeared that our trip was off, the tickets were just too expensive. I had one day in which I could cancel my ticket, now booked for 5:40 in the morning, and get my $512 back without any cancellation fee and also to figure out what to do.
So I hung up. By now it was 10 p.m.. Then out of curiosity I looked at the Delta App to see what I had gotten wrong. There was the 9:45 flight that he had said I couldn’t get, there was the cost in Delta Miles, 53,200, just as I had said. I bought Susie a ticket as I had planned to do. But then it took me two more hours talking to a young woman with a bad cold in the hubbub of South Africa to get my ticket changed from 5:40 to 9:45. At midnight I was ready to go to sleep.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 