We arrive home from the Galapagos Islands and I notice our message machine is flashing. Six new messages, three are from United Airlines saying…….”There has been a change in your flights to Grand Cayman and now there is a disconnect. Please call….” Great, barely home from one trip and we have to deal with our next trip. Sigh.
Back in the winter, we booked flights through Houston to Grand Cayman Island on United Airlines and then connecting onto a Cayman Airways hopper flight over to Little Cayman Island. Along with these flights we reserved a condo and scuba diving.
I phone United to find out what the issue is. Apparently the flights for the Edmonton-Houston and Houston-Edmonton legs are no longer operating. The agent explained that we are now booked on a later flight from Edmonton to Houston and that we would have to stay overnight in Houston. Wait a minute……we have a condo and scuba diving waiting for us, we do not want to be late arriving on Little Cayman. I told the agent that we will have to discuss the options and I will phone her back as soon as possible.
Murray and I decide that we want to keep the Houston to Grand Cayman legs the same to not mess up the Cayman Airways flights, condo and scuba diving. That means we will have to fly to Houston a day early, stay overnight and catch the existing Grand Cayman flight. On the way home, we will fly out of the Cayman on the original day, stay the night in Houston and arrive home a day later than planned. I research flights and pick out the exact flights we want.
All this discussion and deciding included our friend, B, who happens to be a teacher and we had to be sure that she could leave a day early. (She was never contacted about the change even though her phone number is on her reservation.) She then gave me the authorization to change her ticket too.
I phone United to make the flight changes. Holy s***! Two hours on the phone. Two hours! First we worked on going to Grand Cayman. We got those flights changed for both B and ourselves. Relatively easy.
Next came the return trip. United had kindly rebooked our return trip for us. Close your eyes. Picture this. Grand Cayman to Washington DC to San Francisco to Toronto to Edmonton. Sounds direct enough, don’t you think? I just laughed at the agent on the phone and said to her “Can you picture that please? There is no way we are flying that route!”. I gave her the exact flights that we want. We are going to fly Houston-Calgary-Edmonton because it gets us home earlier. Now this gave her quite abit of trouble, because even though I could choose the Calgary-Edmonton flight with a United flight number (and an Air Canada flight number), she could not see it. Her system is different than the public online system. She finally went online herself in order to see it, put me on hold for eons to talk to a supervisor and managed to book all three of us on the flight. What a hassle, but it is done. PHEW!
Next came booking a hotel in Houston for those nights we must stay there. We chose the same hotel we stayed in on another trip – Wingate by Wyndham Houston Bush Intercontinental Airport.
So we are all set for Little Cayman and just counting sleeps again before we leave.