Off to a Bad Start

We’re supposed to fly to Philadelphia tomorrow. We booked the tickets back in March. I booked my ticket using SkyMiles, Josh booked his ticket using SkyMiles, and then we paid for Zachary’s ticket. The flight was practically empty when we booked, so we had our pick of seats – we purposely chose 3 seats all together, for obvious reasons. Because the tickets were all booked separately, I called Delta afterwards to make sure we were all linked as people traveling together. They assured me that we had been linked, and I assumed everything was fine. This morning I went to check in, and noticed that Zachary & I had different zones. Then I realized it’s because our seats are not together! Zachary was still in 23C, which was the seat we had chosen for him, but I was in 29A. I called Josh to see what seat he had – 23B (the seat he had chosen). So I decided to call Delta to find out what in the world is going on. Apparently the flight schedule changed (and they didn’t bother to notify us to that fact – it would have been nice to know that beforehand!) and in the process, they decided to change my seat…despite the fact that our reservations had been linked together. The lady I talked to blamed the seat switcheroo on the flight change (really though – the flight changed by like 5 minutes), and she had no explanation as to why the computer completely ignored the linked reservations. I mean, wouldn’t the point of linking the reservations be to make sure that the system knows that we are traveling together & therefore would like to sit together? She explained that they do keep some seats blocked off for situations like this, but you can only get them at the airport – and she claimed that they do have at least one row with 3 open seats. My issue with this is that they have this completely backwards, manual process to correct what should have been handled by a computer. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a computer? And what if someone beats us there & snags one of those seats before we can?

But it gets better. While I had the phone agent on the phone, I asked her if she could look at our return flight & see what our seat status is on that flight. Yep – they did it again, only on that flight, NONE OF US is sitting together. They kept me in 28A, which was the seat I had chosen, but they moved Josh to 18B, and Zachary to 30C. She was like, “Oh don’t worry – they won’t let your son sit by himself.” Well then again I ask, WHY DID THE COMPUTER PUT HIM BY HIMSELF??? It just makes no sense. I got the same run-around on the return flight – nothing available that she could put us in right away, but supposedly we can get one of the special reserved blocks of seats when we get to the airport in Philly. She claimed it would be no problem, but she has no idea how many other people this might have happened to. And normally, I probably would not care so much, but this is our first flight with both boys, and I’m already a little stressed out about it (Liam does NOT like to be confined or still…), and now we face the possibility of one of us sitting alone with Liam. I had counted on the possibility of sticking Liam in Zachary’s seat with him (figuring they will both fit), or at least letting Liam stand up in our row & walk around a little bit – as much as he could, and us taking turns holding him whenever he gets antsy. If we are separated, that’s not going to happen. Sure, we could still put Liam with whoever is sitting with Zachary, but then that leaves one of us to deal with 2 kids by ourselves while the other one sits alone with nothing to do. So it’s totally less than ideal, and now I’m going to be pissed about this until we get to the airport tomorrow morning & see what they can do for us. And if they tell us there’s nothing they can do, I’m going to be pissed some more. And then we’ll have to deal with this all over again on Monday when we come back. And if I knew anything about programming a computer system, I’d offer to go down to Delta & fix their stupid program so that this sort of thing wouldn’t have to happen.