The Sunday Post and Stacking the Shelves–The Travel Nightmare

The Sunday Post is hosted by Kimba of The Caffeinated Book Reviewer. This is a weekly meme where we can share news of the week and highlight new books received.

Our annual trip to OKC and the Grand National Morgan Horse Show started off on the wrong foot. I have never experienced a travel nightmare quite like this one. Our flight time was bumped forward after I purchased the ticket, and I thought Yeah! We’d get to Oklahoma a little earlier, and maybe we could get a good night’s sleep for the first time since we started doing this. Arrival day is already extremely stressful; I have to coerce employees to submit their time cards a little early so I can prepare their paychecks for the week I’m gone. Then I have to make sure all of the important vendors have been scheduled for remittances while I’m gone. My employer is a pain in the butt during the entire process and continually insists that I can’t be out of the office for a week. General travel nerves don’t help.

On this particular vacation, Delta Air didn’t help, either. After moving our flight up, they moved it back after we got to the airport. First by an hour. Then by two. Pretty soon, departure was delayed by four hours. One of my traveling companions called Delta to see if we could get on another flight that connected to OKC, because her daughter had to show in the morning. Delta wasn’t helpful with that, but they promised that the flight would not be canceled.

Well, guess what. A little after 10pm, they canceled the flight. After we had been waiting in the airport for about 6 hours. After all of the other flights on different airlines had left for OKC – on time. I’m so disappointed with Delta and their refusal to help us on Friday night. Then they put us on a flight that hopped all over the South, and we wouldn’t have arrived in OKC until after 3pm Saturday. That was after spending the entire day flying. That didn’t work for us.

Laurie finally got a helpful customer service agent on the line (oh, yeah, because it was fast approaching 11pm. all of the “helpful” live agents had gone home for the day, so we had to call the 800 number), and she booked us on a flight that departed from DTW at 6am yesterday, connected in DFW, and arrived in OKC around 11am. On an American Airlines flight. Delta provided a crappy hotel room for us, and we got about 3 hours sleep because we needed to check a bag and have a ticket agent at AA print boarding passes for us because the ones we had were on Delta stock.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we finally arrived in OKC, Aud made her class because the show agreed to move it back a few hours (there was another exhibitor in her class on the canceled flight, too, but that’s a story in and of itself!), and we were all exhausted and stressed out yesterday. I have never been so disappointed with an airline’s performance, and I’m so upset that they refused to help us out on Friday afternoon, when they could have moved us to another flight. The one positive: we met some very fun and friendly travelers, many who were also going to the show.s

Sorry for the rant! There is still steam coming out of my ears

Hope you all had a great week and have some wonderful books to read!

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