Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Here’s one depressing email from United Airlines (private email address redacted):

From: United <ema...@info.united.com>
Reply-To: United Replies <rep...@info.united.com>
To: xxx...@BKPARK.COM
Subject: European travel notification
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:23:03 0600

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United(R)
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Dear Mr. Byung Kyu Park,

Several European countries have closed their airspace due to
unsafe flying conditions resulting from a volcanic ash plume
that is covering significant portions of northern Europe.

Thousands of flights to and from major European airports
have been canceled, and Eurocontrol, the European air
traffic agency, has said that travel disruptions and delays
will continue well into Saturday as the massive ash cloud
moves slowly south and east. We know that unexpected flight
cancellations are difficult. However, our highest priority
is your safety and that of our crews.

 . If your flight has been canceled, we will rebook you on
   the next United flight with available seats. Check your
   flight status.

http://www.ua2go.com/flifo/FlightInput.do

 . Even if your flight has not yet been canceled, your
   travel may be covered by a travel waiver, and you may be
   able to change your plans without incurring a service
   charge.

http://www.united.com/page/article/0,6867,53414,00.html

 . If your travel plans are impacted by this situation and
   you decide to cancel your trip, you may be eligible for
   a refund of any unused portion of your ticket.

http://www.united.com/page/article/0,6722,52940,00.html

In order to provide additional assistance to our customers
who are currently in Europe, we have extended the hours of
our European reservations centers.

http://www.united.com/page/article/0,1360,50394,00.html

Please know that we are working hard to reaccommodate all of
our customers whose travel has been impacted and to resume
flying our full schedule as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

United Airlines

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What’s depressing about it? The date: it’s dated April 16th, but the volcano erupted on the 14th and the problem with air travel started early 15th. I only wish United had this attitude on the 15th—that may have lead the CS rep to agree to modify my ticket like I wanted to initially and let me travel to London by train (when the bulk of the air traffic had not yet been diverted to train).

Things still would be rough, since my main luggage would not be with me, but I wouldn’t be as depressed as I am now, stuck in the least favorite continent (Europe), in the least favorite country (Germany), in the least favorite city (Frankfurt), and in the least favorite airport (FRA) in the whole universe (I reserve judgment on Martians).

Given that this is presumably a once-in-a-lifetime incident I am not sure how well the lesson would apply, the lesson is learned: in the event of natural disaster, don’t assume things will get better, and let the customer service reps know I will hold them personally responsible for not obeying my wishes (or at least not escalating it to higher level where they know their proper place)—which, in most cases, prove prudent and correct in the long run—in the event things do get worse.

So, thanks to an act of God, my London trip this year is cancelled. This is very disappointing to me, as this would have been my first trip to England with a high chance of adding a second European country to my “good countries” list (Germany, by the way, will never make that list; at least until there is a world war in which Germany fights on our side. Actually, make that 3, first 2 necessary just to cancel out the WWI and WWII). Anyways. Here is the record of all the things that have gone wrong, and a couple things that, if I had done differently, might have changed things for the better.

So the very first thing I did wrong was being slow in reacting to the news. I was lucky enough to be one of the first to hear that our flight got cancelled (and since the flight was cancelled after they had passed through about 20 to 30 people into the waiting area for boarding, I believe my flight was one of the very first to get canceled, the people in 8:30 a.m. flight being the very lucky ones who were the last to depart for LHR). I guess the news was just too incredible to me—I spent the next 10 minutes or so playing Hedgewars, before I got it through my thick head that I probably should talk to the airline people to see what I should do. I think these were the crucial minutes which cost about an hour or two in waiting time later at the Lufthansa Customer Service center one floor up.

After that hour or two of waiting (that I could have avoided, if I had the sense to take advantage of my good fortune in hearing about the plane cancellation so early), I talked to the Lufthansa people, and they were, for the most part, reasonable, if very slow: They put me on the 12:20 flight to LHR and gave me a voucher for a hotel stay and a meal up to 20 EUR. My personal objection, of course, was that they were making me stay in Frankfurt, my least favorite city in the world (it ranks behind St. Petersburg, a Russian city). Also, this would have been half a day of sight-seeing and trips in London missed, as well as my hostel reservation check in. So, I wanted to make an alternate arrangement to get me to London faster, and since this will involve modifications to the ticket and this is a United ticket, not Lufthansa, they told me to go talk to the United people.

And that’s where I made my second mistake. After eventually being directed to the United ticket counter, I tried to explain my intent carefully (the situation didn’t need explanations; whole airports were getting shut down): I could try to arrange for my own transportation to London (probably by train). I just wanted to make sure two things: (1) cancelling the FRA-LHR segment will not cancel the remainder of my trip ; (2) I’ll not get charged for the modification (given the situation), and in fact, that I should get reimbursed somehow for the segment not used (esp. since I will have to pay for the train ticket). Well. The customer service representative claimed that she absolutely could not modify the ticket. What she claimed was that cancelling this segment will get the remainder of the trip automatically cancelled by the computer system, and that she has no way to override that. This is where I made my second mistake: I believed her—as I found out the next day, when the newfound flexibility was useless, it was entirely possible to rework the whole ticket, not only to cancel just the FRA-LHR segment, but also to modify LHR-ORD-SFO segment, at no additional charge to me. I should have believed my own sense of reasonableness and pushed her harder, and perhaps demanded to talk to her supervisor. Escalate.

Anyways. That’s all the mistakes I made; the rest were, well, in God’s hands. I got to the hotel by their shuttle in the late afternoon. My ill-will towards Lufthansa softened a bit at finding that this was a 5-star hotel (and the room was definitely the best I’ve been in so far, including the stay at Doubletree in Oak Ridge, which was fancier than I was comfortable with in the first place). Here are some pictures of the room and the area:

The front view of the Kempinski Hotel Gravenbruch.
[flickr]4525393007[/flickr]
And some of the facilities that are available at the hotel … which is I guess fairly standard at most hotels bearing the name “resort”.
[flickr]4525393371[/flickr]
[flickr]4526023326[/flickr]
What was really nice was my room.
[flickr]4525394049[/flickr]
[flickr]4525394385[/flickr]
And the view from the room.
[flickr]4526024344[/flickr]
And the view of the room.
[flickr]4525394935[/flickr]
And the restaurant was pretty good—although much of that may have to do with the 20 EUR voucher; one would expect a great service at a place where you pay nearly 40 EUR for a dinner; it just felt good because I was paying less than half of what I’d pay.

So, although I might have held a grudge against Lufthansa over all the waits and rather useless customer service (about half the people I had to talk to over this whole fiasco weren’t helpful), as I do against Delta, I don’t.

Everything I did the day after was as good as it could have been done—but man plans, God accomplishes; I wasn’t to make this visit to London. I woke up at 5:45 a.m.; went down for breakfast at 6 a.m.; took the shuttle to airport at 6:45 a.m. (I guess I could’ve taken the 6:00 a.m. shuttle, so in hindsight, maybe that was the third mistake, but I’d have to weigh that against missing the complementary breakfast which was the best hotel breakfast I’ve had … that I didn’t have to pay for). The first thing I saw was a huge line at the Lufthansa counters. Imagine the polar opposite of this, 6 hours later:
[flickr]4525331629[/flickr]
Well. In any case, checking my ticket at one of the kiosks showed that my flight was cancelled anyway. So, not wanting to wait in such long lines (which, I guess, took about 3 to 5 hours to clear up, so if I had queued up, they’d probably have put me on another flight tomorrow 2 hours later or so, and maybe another night of free hotel stay, but without a perfect hindsight that everything I tried to do to get to London today would fail, that wasn’t a reasonable course of action), I headed over to the relatively short United ticket counter. And surprise, surprise, the customer service rep who was at the counter could modify my ticket. She cancelled the FRA-LHR segment, giving me a ticket for my record, and advising me to contact United after the trip to get them to reimburse me for my train ticket. Then, after filling out a form for the checked in luggage (BTW, I had wanted to carry this luggage on the plane; I only checked it in because of Lufthansa’s stupid rule about 8kg weight limit on carry-on and this has caused me more headaches than I’d care for) to be delivered to the London address where I hoped to be staying, I went to the travel center to book my train. The line was long (it was so long that it went around a staircase all the way around so that the end of the line was at the start of the line), but after 3 hours of waiting (i.e. about 11:30 p.m.), I got to the counter to book the ticket. After relatively curt exchange and long wait (this seems to be my typical German customer service experience (e.g. Lufthansa and whoever operates trains); rude and lacking in explanations, although United reps so far have been mostly nice—but they are Germans too, right? So what’s the difference?) the lady told me that there were absolutely no tickets to London until Monday. Because of that experience with United rep where I was told, to put it nicely, an untruth, I pushed her a little farther for clarification: Isn’t there anything with standing room only? What if I take a detour through another city? No. No.

And that’s when all my hopes vanished and I got to writing this post mortem. I have given up on the London trip this time around. I am glad enough to have booked for a direct flight to U.S., waitlisted for an early flight tomorrow (doubtful that I can make it) and confirmed reservation for a direct flight to SFO on Monday. If I can get out of this miserable city tomorrow morning, by God, I will. If not, as a friend suggested, I’ll take a train ride to escape this accursed city and the country (maybe Luxembourg, or even France) until I can return on Monday for the retreat to my beloved country.