Katy Goes 3 for 3

March 26, 2011 - Rick

kathy was a 100% success with approvals from the Alaska Airlines personal credit card, US Airways personal credit card, and the Capital One Venture card. We have received the confirmation that her 100,000 miles have been reserved for her. She is matching her AA miles.

On the Alaska card, when we called to activate, they seemed to be under the impression the signup bonus was only 20,000 miles not the advertised 25,000 miles. It took escalation to a supervisor, citing the web address of the offer and finally verbal confirmation from the supervisor that it would indeed be 25,000 miles. I wrote down the gal’s name, employee number, and date and time of the phone call on the activation sheet so if we have any issues, they can replay the tape. It was an honest front line mistake in my opinion, but what good are 20K in miles. I want 25 at a minimum. Keep your documentation.

Anonymous

Sorry for the bad experience but you have to have those to move from "rookie" to "pro" like your Dad. Important thing is that you got home safe!! Lesson learned! Thanks for sharing.
Bacc

Shannon, it's not just rookies that make mistakes like that. I've been traveling for many years. A couple of years ago (on a multi destination trip) I showed up for an Air Asia flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bali an hour after it departed. I had misread my itinerary originally & didn't double check it that day. Fortunately there was a flight 6 hours later but since its a point to point airline so no refunds and I made an expensive walk up purchase for 2. Now I don't depend on my memory & get a 2nd set of eyes on the itinerary.

Then I found tripit.com. You open a free account, forward your confirmation emails to them and they create your itinerary which is available to you on the web, and on an iphone app. It also allows you to coordinate the trip details of your traveling companions. It is meant for business travel. The master "dashboard" can keep track of all travelers and shows delays.
cvarming

Wow. That is quite a story. I once booked a similar flight, but I did catch it in time and thus didn't miss my flight. May I ask why you booked your flight on priceline? Were they significantly cheaper than Delta for the Delta ticket?

It sounds a little odd that the Delta guys couldn't help you, but I guess they choose to wash their hands and point you to priceline.

Too bad about your very significant loss. I guess I wouldn't really know what to do in your case.
Acker

Ouch. Been there. Done that. Learned, but it's painful when it happens.
Bob B.

Rookie credit history tip – For the young students 16-19 years old. We were surprised to find out that when we added our daughter to our AMEX credit card when she turned 16 (reason – she now had a drivers liscense and we wanted her to have access to money just in case she was stuck somewhere) that years later she already had an excellent credit report. Since we pay all our credit cards on time, she earned some of our history as she was an authorized user.
gpapadop

Ouch, that hurt! Only 40k skypesos to Las Vegas, that's all;-) I would avoid buying air tickets on Priceline! Have your dad give you a primer on ITA:-) Yes always double and triple check your itineraries!

Rookie tip:

Always use http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/
to avoid being taken advantage of by low life cabbies like the one at LAS!

The best lessons are the most expensive…this is from my line of work and it sure applies in this hobby too!
René

Wow. Yikes – Shannon! You need more FF'ers with elite status on your speed dial (when your phone works) to help when stuck. Have Rick give my number to you and feel free to call anytime!
Anonymous

Shannon,

That is brutal. I think you're going to get a lot of snide comments about knowing you're flight times but that's an honest mistake and one that three guys I travelled with last week made as well. Question though – how did the the phone battery last all day so that you could use the alarm?

I guess my Rookie Tip for flights you book on Priceline (or any aggregator for that matter) is to use the one-time text message service that most airlines offer. That way, you can get texts about schedule changes (or reaffirmation of correct times) and avoid these kind of fiascos. It's a bit more of a pain and takes time but definitely more preferable to what you went through.

Here's info for doing so on Delta:

"One-time Notification
Maybe you’re just picking someone up at the airport or don't travel that often. Use our one-time notification service to:

Get alerts for a specific flight.
Know about delays, cancellations, schedule changes, and reminders.
Request email or text message alerts.

Use our one-time notification service."

Best,
Greg S.
Anonymous

Shannon,

I laughed when I read your 1 am mistake, not because I was laughing at you, but because I did something very similar in Greece not too long ago. Booked a morning flight into Santorini from Athens landing at 6am, with a return at 7:25pm, or so I thought. Turns out I actually booked a 7:25AM flight because I forgot they used military time in Greece!

When I realized my mistake (long story), I found out that the only flight that night was fully booked. Ended up taking a 6 or 7 hour ferry boat ride instead of the 30 minute flight.

So, don't feel so bad. It happens to non-rookies also!
Tom H

Definitely done that before. And I second the recommendation for TripIt.com – the app on my phone is my best traveling friend ever. Makes it so much easier, keeping track of hotel and rental car reservations as well as flights, and the SMS notifier quite often lets me know of gate changes/delays/cancellations before the airline puts anything up on the boards. A couple months ago I was sitting at the gate waiting for boarding and got a note from TripIt saying the flight was canceled. Nothing had been announced at all by the GA. I went to the Customer Service counter and was first in line to be rebooked when they finally did announce it. Turns out there were only 2 seats on any of the remaining flights that day, so it was only myself and the next guy who actually got out! I was totally sold on their service right then.
Arpita S

Rookie Tip: Searching for low-level award on Delta Airways

Shannon, you mentioned that you saw delta awards for 40K miles. In my experience, Delta has lots of award availability at 25K level closer to flight departure but you need to know how to book them. First, search each way as one-way award. Delta does not allow one-way award but this often helps you see the availability at the 25K level. If this doesn't work, search for one-way award to one of the DL hubs like MEM, ATL, MSP. If any of these shows availability at 25K level, try to construct the award from there, searching each segment as a one-way award. Once you have pieced together all the segments, call Delta and book the award. Using this method, I get a 25K award almost every time.

Arpita S
Anonymous

This is why I never recommend that people buy airline tickets on travel websites such as Priceline, Travelocity, etc.. Since the airline didn't issue the ticket, you have no one to speak to in person if something goes wrong (missing your flight, needing to get rebooked) and no guarantee that you won't be charged a fee to have the airline change your ticket for you over the phone or at the airport.

But I am surprised that you had to pay such a hefty fee to get home – usually missing a flight just means that you pay a change fee that depends on the fare rules and the airline. But $800 sounds like you had to buy a last-minute one-way ticket, which might have been avoided if you had booked your ticket with Delta.
Anonymous

We all have bad days but you really need to double or triple check everything when it comes to flying/hotels/cars unless you don't care about spending the extra money.

Same for early morning flights (I'm not an early person) where I will use two alarm clocks to make sure I got up.

If you aren't careful you will pay the price and usually that is no fun.
FrugalTravelGuy

Thanks everyone for the comments. I feel better knowing I am not alone in these types of mishaps.

Anonymous- I omitted parts of the story for the sake of time. After I got my flight scheduled I went back to the hotel,(my husband was still there) and got the charger. We had lunch and he left on U.S. Airways for home.
FrugalTravelGuy

The previous comment was from me – Shannon. Not rick .
Bikeguy

I just did this x6! Booked a cruise that returned on a Sunday and bought the 6 tickets home for Saturday. luckily I realized my mistake 8 days before the flight, when I tried to book a shuttle from the boat to the airport. Cost a little over $1200 for the six of us to fly out Monday, as Sunday would have been $2400. And I second the multiple people in your cell. Geoffco found an available F seat DTW-SEA on a Monday morning after my flight that i had already been UGed on went mechanical. The agent didn't see any and I asked her to input what he found. I still owe him one for that.
senorric

I did the opposite twice, showing up at the airport and the boarding area a day early years ago. Fortunately the airlines allowed me to fly each of the flights. I doubt they would accommodate me in that situation today without extra charges. I'm very careful about checking and rechecking dates and times now.
Valerie

My family did the exact same thing out of Las Vegas a few years ago! Trying to get 8 people home resulted in some of us being stuck there for days.

After growing up traveling with my family & having about everything possible go wrong at some point, my best rookie travel tip is to just expect things to go wrong every once in a while. Do everything you can to prevent it & learn from your mistakes, but problems are unavoidable. Traveling is much more enjoyable if you can just roll with the punches when the unexpected happens. And don't be too hard on yourself, everyone makes stupid mistakes!
tivoboy

couldn't you get a ONE WAY DELTA award ticket for much less "money" than 800$?
Jason

It happens to everyone. I went ten years of flying before my first missed flight. When I was living in NYC I was headed to La Guardia and had somehow looked at my arrival time in the Midwest rather than departure time (after goading my wife about punctuality over and over!) and missed my flight by about 20 minutes. Thankfully I was able to get them to switch me to a flight out of JFK after talking very, very nicely to enough American folks, but it was all my fault. Lesson learned!
Lance

~Rookie Tips~

I left my tip for last week in last weeks comments section. Here is a new entry for this week

Become the expert shopper for friends and family. Most of us savvy flyers are also savvy shoppers. We know where to find good deals, and sort through the options. You can use this to your advantage. Let all your friends and family know that if they need help shopping for high ticket items, that you can help them find there deals. If you monitor stores that correlate with the Continental Chase card, or AMEX, their shopping tools have some great bonuses. Just last week I found a great deal for a friend at Best Buy, on a decked out HP computer. It was around $1000 at best buy online. By using my chase card, I realized the following Continental points

$1000
x 4 points per dollar for linking through the continental site

x 1.5 point per dollar spend with the .5 bonus Chase currently offered me on continental

x 1250 Best Buy points for being a best buy premier silver member
(worth $25 in gift cards)
———————-

So my haul was about 5,500 continental miles, and $25 in Best Buy rewards

My tip is to quick link all the airline and credit card sites that offer bonus miles per spend online shopping. They often have bonuses and different deals from time to time; however, AMEX, and Continental Chase have consistently been the best…

Best,
Lance H
Anonymous

Hi Shannon, Thanks for sharing the story. I encountered the same experience with the taxi/shuttle event at LV. The highlight of your trip probably was staying at the Palazzo since the arts were amazing…

I recently found this blog, and I really enjoy reading it every day. Let's hope that your next trip to LV would be more enjoyable.
The Nomad

Shannon, don't feel bad about it. Whatever happens, happens for good. Maybe this $800 loss will prevent you from making a mistake in the future which might have cost much more. And as everybody else has said, you are not the only one making such a mistake.
Anonymous

I'm sorry for your troubles. My brother-in-law probably holds the world record for this problem.

Most India (MAA) flights to Europe depart between early in the morning before 05:00AM. There are many folks who focus on the departure day and show up that night. There must be at least one passenger every day who forgets to show up the night before to catch the early morning flight.
mangoMan

My wife did the same thing a year or two ago, also with Delta. But she had booked with Delta.com and a savvy phone agent was able to get her on a later flight for the $30 (or whatever it was at the time) confirmed standby fee. Not sure how/why that worked considering her original flight had already departed, but we ended up surviving that boo-boo on the frugal side!
Anonymous

Just an 800 dollar mistake in vegas, count yourself lucky
Gary Steiger

There are two public buses leaving the airport, each every half hour. They both end up near the downtown hotel/casino areas, going different routes. If they don't go near your hotel or near a transfer point to a bus there, there is another bus from downtown that goes down the strip. This is a very cheap way to get from the airport to wherever you are going. Also, it allows you to see and interact with real local people, not just tourists and those serving them. It is safe. There is constantly monitored camera on board each bus. The driver just pushes a button if he wants the observers to pay attention. So all local bad guys know this and do their thing elsewhere.

There is very cheap, comfortable, safe lodging available downtown. See my writeup on this and a link to the bus system at http://home.earthlink.net/~pgary/TravelFrame.html.
Neal

I use an free App for my blackberry (also available for iPhone and Android) called Tripit. You simply forward your travel itineraries by e-mail to Tripit and it all syncs online. Subsequently the free app syncs to my Blackberry's calendar. This is an easy way for me to always have access to my flight, hotel, rental car, cruise, etc. details, confirmation numbers, and anything else you can think of. It's a great, FREE way to have everything with my travel in 1 spot to I can always reference it and set reminders in my calendar!
Curtis C

I can't help with missing a flight, I've done it a couple times now, but the ground transportation is definitely worth a little research effort before hand.

I save the taxi for when I either don't have enough time to research(rarely), there are no other options(sketchy area, red eye flights, where am I?, etc.) , or if I lose track of time and need to get to where I'm going asap.

Most major airports have some sort of public transportation system to at least a major metro destination, but if the airport has an info desk, that's a great place to quickly find out what's what.
Vincent

In reference to booking through sites like Priceline. I used Vegas.com to purchase my last trip. I was able to find promo code "getaway" that takes an additional $25 off. The real deal I found that saved me some decent money was to purchase $100 Vegas.com giftcards from Costco.com for $80. Vegas.com allows you to apply up to 20 giftcards per transaction. I ended up booking a 3 night trip air/hotel(Encore) from DFW for approximately $300/person. I'm a rookie just thought I would share the info.

Thanks
BobbyM

Shannon – sorry you went through this, but look at it this way – you left Vegas with just a $800 loss – oh I have done worse – much worse – and not with the airlines!

On the rookie tip – just one word – Tripit!
Jonathan

Rookie trip from Jonathan H.
Always check-in online in the ballpark of 24 hours before your flight… might help with that red eye am/pm issue.
Susan

Ah – welcome to the world of 'made that mistake once and will do so never again.!' I agree with Bacc…it is not only rookies. I had the same thing happen on my last trip to Europe. Thought I was confirmed on a June 13 flight AMS-DUB. And this was for [b]two[/b] people (I had done the booking) – we show up only to find that I had booked the 13th – it was the 13th of May however. I think the little month indicator on the website tripped back to May as I moved the cursor. Ah well, $700 apiece later….

So, even a well-traveled person can pull a big one! Take heart that you have that one behind you.
Admin

Made a similar mistake but with a happier outcome, I normally take the 9pm flight out of` DUB in Y with by wife, this time we booked a 8pm, but arrived 50 minutes short of the 9pm. Of course I missed my scheduled flight. Pleaded with the ticketing agent at DUB for BD – as we had Silver status she put us on the last two seats on the 9pm in Business…we were delighted just to get home… Love to BD (but how long?)

Katy Goes 3 for 3

Related Posts