We made it to Los Angeles yesterday from Nashville after a crazy day. We look happy in these pictures at the ticket counter when we first arrived at the airport. Then things got funky.
Back in September, Corinne bought a gift card from a third party site and used it then to buy our tickets. All good.
Or so we thought.
Apparently they don't charge the cards until the 48 hours before the flight. They also don't guarantee gift cards unless they are bought directly from the airline's website. So we stood at the ticket counter for over an hour trying to figure everything out. Everyone with small kids understands how challenging this was.
Half of us were checked in for the flight, half us weren't. There may have been some fraud involved with whoever originally purchased the gift cards and resold them to the site we bought them from. They may have issued a chargeback or something and so by the time the airline decided to charge the card, they had already been marked as invalid. Frustratingly, the airline never notified us of this.
They did end up honoring the original price we thought we paid back in September, but we had to pay the extra right then (over $1,200), and it was a major process for them to secure that pricing and get us on the plane. They didn't think we'd make it.
We totally did the crazy family running through the airport thing. When we got to TSA, I said, "Our plane leaves in twenty minutes, can we please cut in line?" Everyone graciously let us jump right to the front (if we hadn't, we surely would have missed our flight). There were no other flights if we missed it, as every other flight was totally booked.
We got through security, and I ran to our gate at C15. We had about ten minutes left but we made it! While we were at the ticket counter, they called ahead to ensure we'd have five seats in the back together for our family. Unfortunately, another family showed up late and they confused them with us so they snagged up the seats.
Negotiating with a plane full of people to give up their seats so our family could sit together was no easy task. Devon and Monet ended up being a row ahead of me and a woman with claustrophobia had to stay in the aisle with them. There was only a middle seat behind them and the guy in that aisle was completely oblivious to what was going on and neither I nor the stewardesses could pull him away from his phone call. A nice couple decided to separate and sit in two other seats in the back of the plane so Corinne and Aria could sit together one row up and to the right.
Eventually, about 30 minutes into the flight, the guy next to me recognized what was going on (my standing up to help my 4-year-old daughter now again may have finally got his attention). He convinced the lady in front of him to take his seat, he took mine, and I joined my kids.
It was a crazy day.
Eventually we got settled and Devon and Monet got to watch videos on the new DVD player we got.
As an added bummer during the flight, Corinne's laptop froze up and ultimately her external hard drive corrupted her catalog file with the two and a half days of photo editing she's been doing for a wedding she shot recently. I tried using all my skills to recover the file, but it's destroyed as the disk won't even let me copy it and restore tools like dd only get about 24k into the file. Disk repair utilities have failed me as well. She's now redoing all her edits.
If that's the extent of our travel vacation drama, we're probably doing fine. :)
I thought you might enjoy our crazy story and, for me, it serves as a reminder why the current financial system is completely broken. Credit cards were invented prior to the Internet. They are a "pull" system, not a "push" system like cryptocurrency. It's like giving someone the combination to your safe and then asking them to only take out what they are supposed to. That, combined with charge backs which can happen months after a sale, create so much fraud to make the whole system a wreck. This time, it landed on us. We'll be following up with the gift card company to try and get our money back and writing a letter to the airline to suggest they adjust their policy to either charge the gift card immediately or at the very least contact the dang customer involved if the payment they did months ago didn't go through right before the flight.
Happy holidays to you all.
