What started out pleasant enough with breakfast with me at Panera Tuesday turned out to be a rather nightmare-ish day for Ornery. His flight was due to depart at 10:50, so he left home at 9:00 so he could get his car parked and check in with plenty of time before boarding. When he arrived at the self-check ticket kiosk, the code was rejected. After trying a couple times, then taking it to the ticket counter to have the stewardess there garner the same results, she did a bit of sleuthing and discovered that "Becky" had cancelled his itinerary at 6:00 that morning.
No one ever found out who Becky was, but she was thorough in her destruction. Upon arriving (on the same flights he had originally been scheduled for) in West Palm Beach, the car rental agent informed him they did not have any record of his reservation, and when he showed them his paperwork, they said they could not possibly give him that rate. They did give him a car, and due to Ornery being "a big guy who'd had a really bad day," the clerk upgraded him to a larger vehicle.
Arriving at the full hotel caused him a few more moments of grief before the clerk there was able to reassign his room since the reservation had just been cancelled that day and they had not given it to another. Phew!
It is stressful enough to go through the usual hurdles of commercial flight without adding all the additional obstacles. Hopefully the rest of his trip is not fated to proceed in a similar state!
This post really freaked me out!! So much so that I even read it to my husband, and now he is freaked out! I can't even imagine the frustration of being in that situation, but above and beyond that my mind would be racing (is racing! who am I kidding? lol) to try to figure out how on earth someone could accomplish that! Glad to hear it all worked out in the end, and sorry the poor guy had to endure that. Any chance you will be able to find the culprit?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if we will be able to discover that or not. The trip was planned through the corporate travel office which contracts with a travel agent. It would be my guess that since the entire trip was cancelled, it was done by someone at the travel agency. Either way, since it all turned out alright, there doesn't seem to be much reason to point fingers, but I know the FSI travel department will look into it.
DeleteI am with you on freaking out, though. I am so glad I was not along--and probably the person who messed it up is as well. :) Ornery is pretty laid back, and he doesn't like to stir things up, so other than to report it, he won't likely do anything else.
Thanks for the comment!
tm
It almost sounds like a computer system error or some other non-human or totally inadvertent error. I am probably thinking along those lines since Dennis has had computer hard-drive, file corrupting woes for weeks that even a trip to the repair shop hasn't remedied. He feels as helpless and bereft as a dog owner does when his pet is ill! And of course it would coincide with our other designer being out for 2.7 weeks on his honeymoon!
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