March 4, 2014

Travel Tuesdays

I think one of the best things about this blog is that all three of us get to talk about topics that are most relevant to us. Right now in my life, one thing I've learned is travel. I have plenty of horror travel stories and advice which can be useful so I'm going to start writing about my travel stories and things I've learned along the way.



One of the worst parts about traveling all the time is that I've had lots of experiences with flights delays and cancellations. For example, last month, I was flying back to St. Louis from San Francisco but got stuck in Denver because my flight was cancelled. Initially the flight was only delayed but turned into a cancellation. Here are some of my tips for dealing with a cancelled flight:


1. Go to the Airline Customer Service Desk
When your flight is first cancelled, the first thing to do is to immediately go to the airline Customer Service Desk to reschedule your flight. It's important to remember a whole plane has just been cancelled so finding the nearest customer service desk is essential so you won't get stuck in line waiting forever.

2. Know your rights
Depending on your situation and your rescheduled flight, the airline will be required to provide meal and/or hotel vouchers. For my cancelled flight, it was the last flight to St. Louis for the day so they could only reschedule me for another day. That meant, the airline provided me with a breakfast meal voucher and a hotel voucher for the night.

3. Sometimes it's better to buy another flight
If you're under a tight schedule or your rescheduled flight is not what you wanted, it can be better to just buy another flight through another airline. My flight to St. Louis was supposed to be on Sunday but they rescheduled me on a flight on Tuesday. Well I had work on Monday so that wasn't going to work for me so I bought another flight through Southwest for Monday morning and just got a refund instead. Another option is to fly standby on an earlier flight but you'll have to rely on pure luck for that. The action you take just depends on what kind of schedule you want and the date of your rescheduled flight.

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