On Friday, we waited at JFK to no avail as a winter storm grew worse and caused all flights to be cancelled late afternoon. We tried everything and ultimately we managed to get transferred to a Sunday flight out of La Guardia, which would get us to Chicago O’Hare and then onwards to Los Angeles. The way home was interesting as we got to ride the most amazing off-rode vehicle ever and both of us spent two more nights back in Manhattan, braving first a night of pelting sharp snow and then the screaming drunk people celebrating St. Patrick’s Day all day and night.
I got up early just to see if I could make to the airport early and get a seat on my flight out to Chicago, as the internet was not allowing me to grab seat. When I got there, the woman said I still could not get a seat, so I sat down and waited for my buddy to show up. Of course, my buddy, through picking the right person and with a bit of smile and flirting manages to find someone who CAN assign seats even as they are locked up on the normal screens. Go figure. We get seats and then move downstairs to grab lunch before we board.
It’s still many minutes before the flight takes off, so we grab some food and sit down at the gate itself. We see lots of people milling around but nobody getting on the plane and it’s 1215p with the flight supposedly taking off at 1229p. So we just wait thinking that they’ll make an announcement when it takes off. Time passes, and passes. Then we see the board go blank and our flight is not talked about anymore. We get up to check the departure board and the FLIGHT IS NOT THERE. We then see the guy who was working the gate’s desk, stop him and ask him about our flight. He tells us it just loaded everyone and took off.
WTF?
We were sitting there at the gate and yet there was no final boarding call, no call for us even after we had boarding passes and were checked in! Unbelievaable. There wasn’t even a movement of people onto the plane that we could see! We run upstairs to the Admiral’s Club to see if we could fix this. They were as perplexed as we were and put us on the next flight to Chicago taking off at 115p, which was boarding right now. The guy grabs our boarding passes and runs ahead of us to see if he can get us seats, and we shuffle quickly after with our carry-ons. We see him at our gate and he confers with the gate agent, who, while boarding the last few folks, manages to get us FIRST CLASS SEATS. I thought we were really screwed and would have taken any seat just to get out of La Guardia! But somehow, we score the last two first class seats in time, nabbing them before all the upgrade requests ahead of us.
We get this confirmed, hop into line, get our seats, and look at each over the rows, thinking how unbelievable this whole trip back has been. Still, it’s not over yet. I have now only 10 minutes to get to my connecting flight when I hit Chicago. I hope that they hold this flight for me.
My buddy and I are never ever flying to or out of La Guardia again. That place is very bad for the traveler being very small and crowded with not enough places to sit and we’ve experienced firsthand poor operations. During the cold weather months, we’re going to ask our main ringleader if we can have meetings somewhere warm and not subject to snowstorms, like the Bahamas. Think he’ll go for that?