Isn't It a Shame?

So as some of you may know, I was supposed to be flying to New York tonight for a few days for work. Well, after spending 5 hours waiting for my delayed flight at the airport, it was eventually cancelled.

Now I get to do it all over again at 8am.

However, a few bright spots
i) I have my good ol' apartment to come home to. Imagine having to go try to get a hotel figured out -- worst part? Because it wasn't the "airline's fault" you have to pay for the hotel yourself. What a grift.

ii) Half the people were rebooked for the 6am flight. Can you imagine spending from 6pm to 11pm at the airport, then being sent to a hotel...getting to your room at midnight, then getting up 3 hours later to head back to the airport?

Labels: cancellation, crapshoot, flight, new york

Usually when you hear about soccer riots, a few things are true:
- the riots take place in Europe somewhere
- there's a big national rivalry(home vs away, where away is a neighbouring country/region)
- the riots are between drunken attendees

Well, here in Canada we do our soccer a little different. The fans here are much too passive to get so far as to riot( perhaps a little booing if we're really upset). So the Chilean U20 soccer team took matters into their own hands

Sounds like after a wild game - something like 50 fouls were called, with 2 red cards and 9 yellow cards being handed out - that the Chileans just couldn't behave themselves. They first had to be prevented from "physically assaulting" the referee, who was escorted - running no less - off the field by police.

Later they got into what sounds like a pretty serious brawl with police:
"the bus just unloads and there's eight, 10 players come off the bus and there's just fists flying everywhere, between the cops, the security guards, a couple of ladies were involved that were security." " People throwing fists and cops with their billyclubs out and then all of a sudden it got out of control and a police officer grabbed his taser gun and tasered someone - I don't know if he was a player or if he was part of the team" "Police eventually handcuffed several players, some of them bloodied and screaming, and escorted them back into the dressing room. "

Ah that Chilean U20 team - now THAT's *class*!

Ah, Air Canada, my frustrations continue.

Woke up this morning to my weekly email from Air Canada "Flights to Vancouver -- only $203!!". I'm flustered, but click on the link. Lo and behold, all the flights from Toronto to Vancouver are now $203 versus the $259 "Seat sale" I bought a mere 5 days ago.

Well - good on me. Following Laura's sage advice I *didn't* click on the "Save $5 - no changes or cancellations". So, well aware that there would be a $40 per way change fee, I still figured that if I called I'd be able to "cancel" the 259 + taxes, pay the $40 change fee and "buy" the 203 + taxes ticket, and get the difference as a credit for future use. We're not talking about a whole swack of money, but $23 or so on each ticket * 3 = $70 credit which would atleast make me feel better about things.

So I call only to be informed that my ticket is "non-refundable". Well yes, but I'm not *asking* for a refund, I'm asking for a credit. "Well, we'd be glad to give you the credit, but your credit can only be applied to one flight, and any REDUCTION in price is forfeited, but any additional fare price must be paid."

Now, I had read all of the rules about this very carefully on the website when I chose that $5 option, and nothing stated anything about losing money -- their terminology was that when using the credit "a $40 fee applies plus any additional fare difference". But she was insistent and wouldn't budge as I suppose any good customer service agent would.

So I'm a little peeved about things - at a minimum, I should have chosen the Save $5 option, which would have saved me $15+tax.

As an aside, I subsequently looked at trying to cancel / change the flight myself online, and the rules / information on *those* sections of the website were quite clear that changing to a lower price ticket would forfeit the difference...they should really make that clearer on the PURCHASING side of their site.

As some of you will know, I've been planning on heading to Vancouver this summer/fall for a bike trip with my friend Jason from school. Glorious times and all - the only caveat being buying airplane tickets to get out there. Laura's coming too for a few days, then heading to Calgary, so she's not going a regular "round trip".

Anyways, for a long time we were thinking about this other airplane called Sun Wing which was considerably cheaper than Westjet / Air Canada. Except, it only flies twice a week, and it flies at somewhat odd hours. But cheap -- like half the price kind of cheap.

After doing more reading on Sun Wing, we decided to opt out -- the $400 savings would be fantastic if everything went according to plan, but if there were any hiccups at all(mechanical problems, delays, etc) than it could ruin the whole vacation. So choices were narrowed down to WestJet and Air Canada.

Given that we were pretty flexible on which week we went, I figure we could lock in on some kind of seat sale, but I didn't want to wait til the last minute and end up paying way more than what I would have if I bought earlier... For travel in august, both westjet and air canada had flights at 259->279...but september(our prefered travel month - less kids) flights were 379. We decided to wait it out, hoping september would go down later.

And it did. Down to 249! Sweeet. Even better? Westjet had one flight at 209, but it didn't get in until 11, so I emailed Jason to ask if that'd be okay...but alas, I didn't hear back from him until Tuesday, and by then the flight for *thursday*(our planned departure date) was up to 249. Wednesday and Friday were still 209, but those would mess up Laura's plans to take the train to calgary. So, now faced with 249 WestJet(bad hours) or 249 Air Canada (good hours), we went Air Canada.

Logged back onto westjet today, and the thursday flight is *back* down to 209. WTF. And Air Canada? Yah, some of theirs are down at 209 now too(but the bad hour ones, w hich does me no good - I'd have to pay a $40 change fee, so wouldn't save any money).

Does this story sound familiar to you at all? Kinda like when I got hosered buying tickets to go to Florida back in March? Ya. Airlines hate me.

Watched Music & Lyrics with Laura last night, and have to confess that I really rather enjoyed it. There was music, that was Drew Barrymore, and there was *cough* Hugh Grant( for Laura, honestly). What more could one want?

Had a stellar weekend up at Sara's Dave's cottage. Thanks for having us! I *will* master windsurfing, I swear. We build a wicked awesome sand castle slash mount vesuvius.

Sara informed us that she'd found Steven Boone on the facebook. Oh man, for the win. Seems more normal than I would have expected.

Also, for those not in the know Chinese Fire Drill

Labels: Chinese Firedrill, Cottage, Mount Vesuvius, Steven Boone

Quick update before bed:

- Canada Day long weekend was nutty hectic... Saturday LT and I went down to St Lawrence market and made up a picnic lunch for ourselves, then headed over to the Island for an afternoon of sunshine and reading on the beach. I played a squash match with my friend Dave (as always, I lost 3 games to 2, 9-7 in the last game) then went to Asahi for all you can eat sushi, which as always made me fantastically happy.

- Sunday we headed up to Laura's parent's place in Markham and went for a day hike, then did a BBQ for dinner before heading to the local fireworks show, which was moderately good but no match for waterloo.

- Monday was my first visit to the Toronto Zoo in several years. On one hand, it was a beautiful day and lots of fun...they really do have quite an incredible assortment of animals - it's really amazing that they're all able to live (albeit in a very artificial way) in Canada given their diverse originals and natural habitats. That being said, the zoo made me sad more than anything else. It's so frustrating to read about all these species that have been poached/hunted to near extinction or that have simply lost all of their natural habitat to deforestation and urbanization, or to global warming, etc. So that's one side of the equation, like "look at these wild horses...there are only 500 of em left in the world, 400 of which are in zoos"....the other is "jeez, can you imagine how incredibly crappy and boring and UNNATURAL it is for a tiger to walk around in a 200m circle around his little tiny cage, all by himself, all day...every day?" While I'm sure the zoo meets or exceeds whatever internation standards for care in terms of the animals, basically *ALL* of the animals were just kinda lying/sitting there looking bored out of their minds. Woot woot.

Tomorrow we're off to Dave (sara's Dave's) cottage for weekend festivities! And as an added bonus, NEXT weekend I'm off to Brian Orr's cottage (a bud from uni) to hang with all my pals from school / residence.