It Gets Worse

It’s always darkest before the storm. Today, Wednesday is the day before our delayed trip to Bangkok. We have missed the Burma part of our tour. On Monday I called Thai and they gave me seat assignments on our confirmed flight to Bangkok. At 12:30pm, 24 hours before our departure, I decided to print our boarding passes for our trip to Bangkok via Inchon Korea on Thai Airways.

When I went on the web to print out the tickets, it said we couldn’t print out the boarding pass I would have to get them at the counter. Just to be sure I called Thai, and they told me the tickets had been cancelled. I didn’t know who or why they had been cancelled. I called Singapore Air, who we got the tickets thru, and was on the phone with them for over an hours. Basically the agent said the tickets had been cancelled, because they were never issued because we didn’t have miles for them in the account. I explained to him that the miles were in Singapore Air’s system, and that the Thai Tickets were issued as an exception, because obviously the miles were lost somewhere in Singapore Air’s computer. He spent over an hour and said there were no available tickets, and we couldn’t be issued them anyway because the miles hadn’t been credited back to us.

I asked to speak to a supervisor, he didn’t want to transfer us to him, but said he would have a supervisor call us back. I said (with Cathy thank God pushing me) NO, I want to wait on line till you can get me a supervisor. We waited for over a half hour, meanwhile, we were looking at buying tickets or aborting the Sri Lanka part of the trip. Finally the supervisor came on line and finally realized this was a problem caused by Singapore Airlines. The Thai flight should never have been cancelled. This was definitely a Singapore problem. After much scrambling they found a great flight for us via San Francisco to Hong Kong and on to Bangkok. If I hadn’t insisted on talking to the supervisor we would never have gotten a flight.

He booked us a flight from SF, but how were to get to SF? I realized Singapore should also pay for that ticket, and when requested he arranged for the SF flight also. In the interim, we cooked a dinner for 5 people! It had been quite a day and night.

The final Itinerary, is actually superior to the original itinerary, but it sure was stressful getting everything worked out.

The dinner we cooked, French Onion Soup, Roasted Chicken stuffed with breadcrumbs and preserved lemons, roasted potatoes, and multiple desserts from Proof, with lots of wine, made for a great evening as we prepared to leave tomorrow (finally) on our trip.