All was set. I was in a cab, on the way to the airport, and on my way to Africa for the first time.

Or so I thought.

Part way to the airport I got a message that my flight from Chicago to New York was cancelled. OK, my flight to JoBurg isn’t until late morning the next day. It’s only early afternoon at this time. And there are TONS of flights between Chicago and New York.

Or so I thought.

Being a seasoned traveler, I figured it was best to continue to the airport and just get in line at the ticket counter. They’ll easily be able to help me.

Or so I thought.

The glitch was that this leg of the trip was booked on Jet Blue. And they only had one more flight that day. And it was full. And they don’t have good relationships with the other airlines to let them accommodate passengers.

So, the first option, which was actually booked for a bit was to go back home, come back the next day and fly via Istanbul to Cape Town meeting up with my group a day late. Well, at least I was going to get there and there would be less of a chance of another cancellation since both of those flights were on large planes.

But I wasn’t going to go away that easy. I left Jet Blue land and headed over to where I am much more comfortable, the United counter. There were some options here as there were flights that day, and I could just buy a ticket if I needed, maybe even with miles. Heck a few hundred bucks was a small price to pay given the whole cost of the trip. However, since I now no longer was booked on the JFK to JoBurg flight, I had to go back to Jet Blue to get some more help from them in order to make this work.

So off I went, back on the shuttle with both bags (thankfully we had to pack very light for this trip). And a couple of hours later I finally had a Delta flight to LGA and was back on the JFK to JoBurg flight the next day. Whew. I am so thankful to the folks at Jet Blue who worked this for me, they were fighting with a system that is not set up to handle things like this yet they got it done. They even got me water from behind the counter when I was getting very thirsty after dealing with this for such a long time.

In the end, I got to New York a bit later than planned, and had to cab it from LGA to our hotel near JFK,  but I was going to make the flight to JoBurg, with the rest of the group (most of whom also had issues getting to JFK). And not miss a day of my long awaited trip.

 

Wendy

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