Airline Madness

I've arrived in Ottawa, albeit, 7 hours late. My thesis statement for this post: Airlines have gone to hell especially if you are flying on US Airways into Philadelphia.

I woke up at 3am on March 7. The airport shuttle got me at 4am. I arrived at LAX at about 5am. My flight to Ottawa via Philadelphia was 30 minutes late. I arrived in Philadelphia with about 40 minutes to get to my connecting flight. But wait, the first adventure begins.

As I got off my flight, I checked the flight status board and it said my flight was "Canceled". WHAT! GRR! So I checked another board, it said "On Time". HUH?  So I rushed to the shuttle that would take me to the other end of the airport. I got to my gate. Gate sign said the flight was on time, but the folks around me said, "Nope, it's cancelled". And so the adventure continued.

I waited in line for about 20 minutes to get on the next flight as a standby. While waiting in line I also called the airline and booked myeself on a flight for the next morning...just in case. Easy right? No, the next flight was also cancelled. So I got on a standby flight for 9:50pm.  I met a very kind lady in line and we both were doing the same thing so we became intant buddies for the next 8 or so hours. 

We decided to go to "Special Services" to see what was going on. Waiting in that line for more than 30 minutes to find out that the airline was giving no hotel vouchers, no food vouchers, nada, zip, nilch.  So with that we were both flustered and needed a drink. Off we went to the OTHER end of the airport to have dinner and a drink. After we went to the info booth to try to find a hotel in case we didn't make it on the standby flight.

Go figure...almost every hotel we called was booked or extremely expensive. More than a dozen nearby hotels were full. Great! NOT!

The good news, I was one of the last 2 people out of 4 or 5 who made it on that standby flight. I was supposed to originally be in Ottawa at 5:40pm and landed instead at 12:20pm. Then it was yet another line for customs and, as I expected, my luggage didn't make it on the flight. And so me, and my lone carry-on headed to file luggage claims and then I taxied to TikkunGer's because by then it was past 1am.

And so I'm here. And if you read this far...get back to work....how boring.  Oh, and now it's 12:40pm the next day and I still have no account of where the luggage is. Happy joy joy. All in all though, I'm glad I'm here and look forward to tomorrrow when I'm more rested and settled in.

(UPDATE: 5 minutes later, bags arrived, I should be getting a call for delivery in the next hour. Whoopie)