(disclaimer: Chuck likes to rant and tends to embellish events to make them seem far worse than they are. We take all travel tongue-in-cheek - stuff happens. First world problems, am I right? PMS - Poor Me Syndrome :p )
We came back to the USA to visit friends and family. We stayed longer than expected (until May 2), but had a lot of fun. This page is a rant regarding our experience. For the fun stuff with pictures, see our posts about Orlando, Indiana (and Tennessee), and Amarillo.
We flew out of Auckland (AKL) to Orlando (MCO) via Dallas (DFW). Of course our DFW->MCO flight was delayed (yay, back in America - more on this later). Once in Orlando, we were notified only 1 of 4 bags also made the trip (thank American Airlines!). Thankfully the rest of our bags were delivered by 2am.
We rented a car after some consternation; it turns out since we don't own cars (and hence auto insurance), we are required to purchase liability insurance through the car rental agency at $15.88/day. For the 26 days we had the car, that came to $412.88! Just for the insurance! I used to pay ~$450 for 6 months of full coverage on my Porsche (granted, it was older and we had multi-policy discounts). Color me irritated. I'm not typically one to get angry with customer service people, they're only doing their job and have nothing to do with setting policies, but I had a rare moment of letting my temperament get away from me. Our agent was calm and polite, but my outburst did get us Melissa added as a second driver for free (instead of the ~$14/day they were going to charge!). I'm not a fan of renting cars. And, less than 48 hours of being back in the states, I received several f-bombs from a driver who didn't like Melissa's driving, even though she had done nothing wrong or out of the ordinary. Yeah.
From there, we were off to Evansville (EVV) to visit friends and family. We tried a new airline, Breeze, that flies non-stop MCO->EVV (convenient). Only the flight was delayed...again and again until it was finally cancelled. So we spent an extra night in Orlando. We were reimbursed $300 plus each got a $100 credit for a future flight that's good for 24 months, so I guess it's ok, especially since we're not on a rigid flight schedule.
We extended our trip an extra week to experience a rare total solar eclipse - Evansville happened to be a prime location for the total eclipse. It was pretty cool. Special thanks to my sister and brother-in-law for letting us extend our imposing on their hospitality - 3 weeks is a bit long.
Then we were off to Amarillo (AMA) to visit our daughter, Brenna, and help her move into a new apartment. And our EVV->DFW flight was delayed a few hours. Then our DFW->AMA flight was delayed (only 15 min). But we made it. We got to spend a couple of weeks catching up with our girl, meeting her new roommate, experiencing all that Amarillo has to offer.
As it turns out, we can book business class flights out of Orlando for about half the price of Dallas. So, guess what? Back to Orlando, but only for a few days. And, yes, our flight from Amarillo to Dallas was delayed about an hour, and our flight from Dallas to Orlando was delayed about 4 hours. Sheesh.
After a short return visit, we were off to Rome. We booked through CapitalOne to maximize reward points (I may do a small rant about that in the future). We thought we were booking a JetBlue flight - that's who appeared in the flights listing. It turns out that JetBlue is partnered with Condor and Lufthansa. Trying to get our itinerary and pick seats was problematic - our confirmation code wouldn't work. After a couple of calls we learned that the confirmation code was with Condor and we needed separate codes for JetBlue and Lufthansa.
With that straightened out, we headed to the airport on the morning of our flight. When checking our bags, Melissa noticed our bags were not following us from Frankfurt to Rome. What?!? The JetBlue employee went off to check why and returned with the explanation that JetBlue has Condor as a partner but not Lufthansa, so the could not transfer the bags through; we'd have to retrieve them and check them with Lufthansa. I call bullshit (more below), but dealing with leaf nodes is futile and we had a plane to catch, so we went on our way.
The flight to Boston and subsequent flight out were both delayed. You guessed it, we arrived in Frankfurt with ~1/2 hour to get our bag, check it in, and make it from the arrival terminal to the departure terminal. Have I mentioned how unhelpful Frankfurt airport personnel are? No good signage to tell you the only way to get between terminals is to find an area at which to catch the shuttle and wait 15 min for it to come pick up a group of penned cattle. Needless to say, there was no way we were retrieving our luggage. Sigh.
So we got to the gate and spoke to a Lufthansa employee to see what our options are. The response? 1. Why didn't they transfer the luggage through to Rome? That's odd...they should have done that. 2. Lufthansa can't send the luggage on. We have to get to Rome and speak to their Lufthansa people so the Rome folks request the luggage from the Frankfurt folks. I'm sure there's a good bureaucratic reason why it works this way, but I'm about 98.72% certain the reason is illogical and total nonsense. But that's just me.
Needless to say, we were without our luggage for about a day. Not a big deal, just another head-scratcher. If only the organizations would hire me to consult on how to increase efficiency, but that's a topic for another day.
