I was fully expecting to be done with documenting the play-by-play of the Iceland trip, and was going to switch to some overview posts. But since the main reason for this blog is documenting what happened for my own sake, the circumstances of our return home qualify for a separate description.
It all started pretty benign. On Day 11, we woke up at around 6am, as planned, and by 7am were pretty much in the middle of cleaning the apartment, and moving the bags to the car. Kids being who they are, and us being who we are (I almost forgot my Chromecast in the TV set - Olga remembered about it at the very last moment), it took us one more hour to be completely done, and by 8:05am we were on the road to Keflavik. We got to the hotel that acts as the home base for mycar.is - our rental agency - around 8:45, just in time for their 9:00am shuttle to the airport (the picture above is our bags waiting to be put on the shuttle).
We checked into our flight, got decent seat assignments (three window seats and one middle seat next to one of our window seats), paid for the bags, returned VAT (first time in our life we actually got a VAT refund!), got through Iceland's security, went into the terminal, and hit duty free stores with plenty of time to spare. Here, the kids went to spend some of the remaining Icelandic kronas (there are plenty of donation boxes in the duty free/terminal areas of the airport, but we were not tempted) on drinks, while I investigated alcohol prices. Turns out that when you subtract Iceland's alcohol tax from the price of booze, the booze becomes cheap, so I bought two half-liters of Brennywin, a small bottle of Icelandic schnapps, and a bottle of rhubarb liquor that I noticed in a few places before. Olga, in the meantime, finally got to the Blue Lagoon-branded store and looked at some cosmetics.
The first plane ride was excellent - we got out on time, I was able to squeeze three movies into the flight time (by starting the first movie immediately upon finding my seat). Choice selection: Mortal Engines, which is essentially a Star Wars remake; Alita, which somehow is missing the second part of the movie; and Captain Marvel, who is so OP, she pretty much obviates the need for Avengers.
That's when good things ended, and bad things started. We got to Newark around 1:40pm local time, in the middle of heavy rain. Apparently, the rain was accompanied by a thunderstorm, because first we simply sat for about 25 minutes on the tarmac, then drove to the gate and sat in front of the gate waiting for a ramp to be extended for another 15-20 minutes. In the meantime, the announcements inside the cabin were all about the inability of the airport to disembark us because lightning!
Eventually, we got off the plane, went through passport control (pretty quickly), but then, got stuck for good at the baggage claim. Apparently, the pause in the thunderstorm lasted just about sufficiently long to let us disembark, but not long enough for the baggage to be unloads. So, the next two hours we've been waiting for the carousel to start working.
There, we received first, and then second of the eventual 14 messages announcing the delay of our LAX flight. The first delay we benign - about 40 minutes, and actually worked well for us, since we were stuck waiting for the baggage. The second delay already made it impossible for us to connect to San Luis Obispo upon arrival to LAX.
With this in mind, we picked up our bags when the carousel finally started spitting them out, went through customs, dropped them off again, took the train from terminal B to terminal C, and headed for our gate.
At this point in time, Newark has been delaying and cancelling flights for about three hours, and no flight has left the airport for just as long. The earliest flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30pm.
At 5:00pm, we reached our overcrowded gate, found two seats, dropped of kids and bags, and went looking for customer service.
Now, Newark is a United Airlines hub. Terminal C where we wound up is a United terminal. There are easily 60 gates on that terminal. One of those gates was converted to customer service, with 8 customer service stations. Which is probably good enough for when one or two flights get cancelled, and one or two flights arrive late and some people miss their connections. When half the flights out of the terminal get cancelled, while the other half gets delayed long enough for almost everyone to miss their connection, eight people is not an adequate number of customer service representatives to deal with it. The line, when I joined it stretched pretty far out, and turned out to go for five and a half hours - about the same time it took us to get from Reykjavik to Newark.
At the tail end of my five-and-a-half-hour-long wait in line, during which I all but befriended a young German filmmaker working in Mexico city, and a Connecticut landscaper heading also to Mexico City to visit his family (as well as a father of two kids who lives with his family in Frederick, MD - about two hour drive away), Olga and I finally got to talk to the customer service rep, who informed us that there are no tickets for continuing flight to SBP for the next 24 hours, there is no way he will allow us to rent a car in LAX, and our best bet is to be put on standby (four people, on a standby in a 50-seater plane? yeah, that's real customer service for you). I had a minor meltdown, told him to shove it and walked away.
By this time, the LAX flight has been delayed another five or six times, the plane we were supposed to fly in was diverted to Pittsburgh, and the gate was changed. At around 11:30pm the plane arrived. At around half past midnight we were allowed to board the plane. At around 1:30am, we were escorted back off the plane. Apparently, United Airlines could not find anyone to pilot the plane. I have never seen flight attendants so ashamed. One dude upon exiting the plane had a major meltdown - with cops eventually called to calm him down. He was rude and loud, but he was not wrong - United f-ed up big with our flight. By 2:00am, they have successfully cleared out the airport, sending out most of the other flights (including at least three LAX flights), but we had to overnight at the airport with no more "compensation" from United than a couple of blankets, a pillow, and $10 worth of food vouchers per person. The latter, given restaurant prices at the terminal is a completely ridiculous sum of money.
The older kid took our vouchers and scored some food. The younger kid felt asleep. So have I for a couple of hours. Around 4:00am I woke up and did a walk through the entire terminal - totaling somewhere around 3500 steps. Around 8:30am - the next announced departure time, we were told that the plane still has no crew. At some point - the plane has one flight attendant, and no pilots. Then the captain showed up. Around 10:30, some planes arrived, and we finally got the full crew. Around 11:00am we boarded the plane. The captain cheerfully told us that we will be getting out of the airport in no time. Then he attempted to taxi the plane to the landing strip... Then the plane stopped. A minute later - and I kid you not - the captain announced that there is a helicopter on the tarmac blocking his path, and someone from a different flight is being hospitalized.
Right before boarding, Olga and I played a game of "figure out the next reason for our delay". We had some ideas - plane being diverted to Miami; captain realizing he should be on vacation; a threat of tornado; a broken ramp.... One thing we did not think of was "a helicopter lands right in front of the plane and blocks its taxi progress." That ate another 30 minutes out of our time.
I got to watch two full movies on this plane: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. After that I started watching Ocean's 8, but the plane landed with about 10 minutes left in the movie.
We got to LA around 2:20pm local time on August 8 - 16 hours after we were supposed to arrive. Went to customer service. Here, things were much calmer, the line had about 10 people. The customer service rep realized our problem, looked up tickets, confirmed that no seats to San Luis are available for the rest of the day, made a phone call, and eventually suggested that (a) we get refund for the remainder of our trip, and (b) rent a car and drive home.
The latter suggestion was exactly the one the Newark rep explicitly denied us. These guys clearly know what they are doing.
Turned out, Budget and Avis are HAPPY to rent us a one-way car to SBP. Prices are quite cheap. I order a full-size car from Budget, we get out of the building, and wait for 15 minutes for Budget shuttle to materialize. All other rental places had their shuttles pass us in troves. When the Budget van appeared finally, it was packed. I was the last to enter it, which carried with it the benefit of being the first out, and therefore, essentially not waiting in line at the counter.
We got a Ford Fusion hybrid - a nice car - with great mileage. Drove out of the airport area, got onto 405, and right before I-10 drove into a traffic jam, which, on-and-off, but mostly on lasted until Ventura city limits.
Stopped at Goleta for some Chicken Ranch chicken. Everyone was really hungry. Then finally headed for the final leg home. We got out of the Budget parking lot at 3:50pm. We arrived home around 10:35pm. One of the longest drives from LA we have ever had.
The final round was the trip to SBP Friday (August 9) morning to pick up our baggage, which arrived way ahead of us, and drop off the car. That completed our trip to Iceland.
Take home message. United really does not care about customer service in their airports. With 60 gates in the terminal, it is easy to distribute the workload by putting an agent at every gate, and processing 40-50 people in parallel, instead of the paltry 5-8 people in the customer service line. That line was NOT shorted by the time we finished our stint in it.
The second take-home message is that Newark airport sucks. Twice I visited Newark in my life (the first one was for a light to Brussels in 1997, where I was meeting my dad for the first time in two years at ICLP'97 in Leuven). Twice I had to overnight it there. In 1997 the flight was moved to morning and I was sent to the hotel. This was before cell phones, so letting people in Belgium know was very difficult. In 2019 incompetence took its toll.
No comments:
Post a Comment