Mike and Victoria went to the wedding of a few dear friends on Saturday 2/19.
And I should say now - the visit to Toledo, and the wedding itself, were both wonderful. (We'll probably do another post about that in the future!)
Getting to Toledo... that was another story entirely.
We were scheduled to fly out on Thursday 2/17 from Los Angeles to Toledo, by way of Chicago. However, late on 2/16, we discover that our Chicago-to-Toledo flight has been cancelled due to weather.
We weren't able to rebook for Toledo, so we booked a flight from Los Angeles to Detroit, with a layover in Charlotte. We booked a rental car for Detroit to get us the rest of the way to Toledo, which was an additional expense that we were not expecting.
Our flight to Detroit was scheduled to depart at 10:29pm, and would put us in Detroit at 12:29am on Friday 2/18. We would then need to drive 1 hour south to Toledo (in the middle of the night, through snow severe enough to ground our original flight).
Our flight to Charlotte goes through two gate changes, but eventually we are able to fly from LA to Charlotte.
We gate-check our bags and board our flight to Detroit, and an attendant on the intercom tells us that we are waiting for the pilot, who "is in the airport." Which, you know, that's always a good sign.
Then every passenger's phone chimes at once and notifies them that the flight has been cancelled, and the attendant tells us the same about 5 minutes later.
They report the reason as a "crew issue," which given the context of the original statement, seems to mean "Our pilot is not coming after all, oops."
We deboard and receive vouchers for a hotel for the night in Charlotte, and we are rebooked for new travel to Detroit (notably, not to Toledo, which was our original stop). And because we gate-checked our bags, we have to wait two hours for our bags to be returned to us before we can get to the hotel and lie down.
We lose a night at our hotel in Toledo, and while we don't technically lose our car rental reservation in Detroit (it's good for 24 hours from the original pick-up time), the reservation did just become incredibly overpriced.
When we take a look at our rebookings, we are BAFFLED at the decisions made.
Victoria is scheduled to fly from Charlotte to Providence, and then Providence to New York, and then New York to Detroit. Mike schedule, however, takes him on a completely different route - from Charlotte to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to New York, and from New York to Detroit.
Our flights also would not leave for another 24 hours, which means we would be scheduled to leave at approx. 10:30pm on Friday 2/18.
This means Mike's flight would not get into Detroit until Saturday at 6:30pm, where he would then have to drive for an hour to Toledo, arriving 3.5 hours after the wedding had begun (and that's assuming he went to the hotel dressed in the clothes he wore on the plane, so let's add at least another 30 minutes to an hour to stop at the hotel, shower and get ready - well, you get the point).
Whoever booked our travel didn't even seem to think that there should be any urgency to our flights, or even that we should fly together as husband and wife.
We call American Airlines customer support, and are rebooked for Charlotte to Chicago, and from Chicago to Detroit. We're flying together, leaving at 5:13pm, which will get us in at 10:30pm on Friday 2/18, where we would then drive for 1 hour at night. It's not ideal but at least we wouldn't miss the wedding.
We are able to reach Chicago and board the Detroit flight, but then it's delayed as we wait for a de-icing, a fuel truck, a second de-icing, and then a new flight plan.
So we end up arriving at midnight in Detroit, where we then must get a brand new rental car reservation (because the car we planned to drive in the snow is, of course, gone - and some genius decides to rent us a cloth-top convertible in 20-degree weather), and finally arrive in Toledo at 1am on Saturday 2/19.
Additionally, with the exception of the woman we spoke with over the phone who rebooked our travel, every American Airlines employee we spoke with was deeply unpleasant, though the worst was probably the man at the desk in Detroit argued with my wife that American Airlines didn't owe us any other remediation because "We got you to your destination," a line he said over and over again.
Which, of course, was wrong. Our destination was Toledo, and American Airlines had given up on getting us there days earlier.