Yesterday was a prime example as to what is the most important thing to pack when you travel on vacation, especially a cruise – patience. It also goes to prove that for my cruise clients, I highly recommend flying in early, at least a day, preferably two days before your scheduled departure. If going to a resort, it is not so important, but when taking a cruise, when the cruise itinerary says the ship leaves at 4 PM, it leaves at 4 PM!!
Layovers are another thing. If you cannot get a non-stop flight to your destination, make sure the layover is long enough so that if something delays your first flight, you have enough built in buffer time to make that second flight. Just because American Airlines has a number of 35-minute transfers in Charlotte for example, doesn’t mean that is the best choice. Watch out for discount airlines as well, that may only have one or two flights a day, and they do not fly every day.
Now let me tell you about our day yesterday. We were flying to Fort Lauderdale (FLL) from Portland, Maine (PWM) with a layover at JFK in New York. The layover was 2 hours – usually plenty of time, since we were going on Delta and all of their domestic flights are in the same terminal. We were to leave PWM at noon. In fact, the pilot wanted to leave a little early at 11:50 AM. It is only a 52-minute flight, so we figured we were all set. We checked our one large luggage, had our carry-on bag and were all set – on the plane at 11:30 AM. Just before the closing of the door the pilot comes on the intercom system. Expecting the usual, “thank you for flying Delta”, he says “Folk’s, we have a problem”. Not something you want to hear. Something that charges the plane’s batteries needed to be replaced, and it was going to take 90 minutes to fix. And we had to deplane. Doing some quick calculations, I figured if we leave by 1:30, takes say an hour to fly to JFK, even if we got to the gate at 3 PM, we should still be OK.
However, I wanted a backup plan. As soon as we got off the plane, I got in line at the gate agent’s desk. This was going to impact a lot of transfers, and a quick check on the Delta app while I was waiting showed there was a later direct flight at 7:10 PM, as well as several with connections. While standing in line, the pilot updated the departure time to 1:20 PM. Still doable to make the connection, if, and a big if, nothing else went wrong.
I finally got up to the agent. The key here is to stay calm. Be polite. Explain your concerns (they already know), but don’t act like a you know what. Ranting and carrying on is not going to solve your problem. Just the agent behind the desk can so that. The person I spoke to was very nice. She indicated that we may still make our connection to FLL, but just in case, she would book us on the 7:10 PM direct flight as well, as she could see it was selling out fast. If we made the 3:30 PM flight, our seats on the 7:10 PM flight would simply get released. And, for out troubles, she upgraded us to first class on the later flight.
The mechanic fixed out plane, and we were back on by 1:10 PM. So far, looking good. Yet 1:20 PM came and went, and we didn’t push back from the gate until 1:40 PM. Time to make that JFK connection as slipping away. Still there was a chance, as we were heading to the runway. Nope – the pilot pulls the plane over. He gets on the intercom again, saying that we can’t take off until 2:09 PM. At that point I figured our connection at 3:30 PM was lost. Wheels up was actually 2:05 PM, and we landed at JFK a few minutes before 3 PM. The flight attendant knew that we and several others had tight connections, and made an announcement to the other passengers to please stay sitting until those like us could try and get off first. Did people listen – most did but some didn’t care. That’s another story. Getting to the gate at JFK was taking time as well, we pulled into the gate at 3:20 PM.
We knew where are gate was, got off and jogged as fast as we could. We could see thee gate…. the door was closed. We missed it by 2 minutes. So close yet so far. The agent directed us to the customer service counter just around the corner, where another great Delta agent got us our new boarding passes for the later flight, checked on our checked bag, as indicated it would get on this new flight. It did!
We had 3 hours now to relax at JFK. A beer was in order by now, and a nice charcuterie board to snack on as we knew this was a dinner flight. We had a car service picking us up to get to our hotel, so a quick call to their dispatch center got all that squared away. The plane left on time at 7:10 PM, we made it to Fort Lauderdale, and still had built a day to relax by the pool before our cruise. Which is exactly where I am as I write this.
Pack patience…. you never know when you will need it.