Sleep Spent

Michelle and I, being the fiscally-minded people we are, decided to take the group coach from our apartment in Kensington to Heathrow for our final flight. (In fact, when we booked the flight, we made sure it was later than the group departure so that taking the coach would get us there with plenty of time.) We were not actually ON the group flight, though.

The coach left promptly at 8:30, and we arrived at Heathrow at about 9:00. Then the confusion started. The group flight was on Virgin Atlantic, so they knew where to go. Our tickets, however, stated that they were “United Airlines operated by Lufthansa.” Doesn’t that sound to you like we should be checking in with Lufthansa? We queried some United staff (the United check-in area was right next to where the bus dropped us off), and the answer came back that they didn’t know anything about the flight numbers and that we would need to go check in with Lufthansa. In Terminal 2. Several kilometers away.

So, we hoofed it over to Lufthansa and got in line to check-in, confident that we were in the right place. Alas, Lufthansa didn’t know what to make of the tickets and (apparently fictitious) flight numbers either. The check-in clerks were only mildly helpful, directing us to the ticket desk where we could get everything sorted out.

That took far longer than necessary, though, because the woman behind the desk was very short and, in a word, unhelpful. We had to ask her four times to call United for us so we didn’t walk all the way back there just to discover that, oh, wait, no, we needed to be at the Lufthansa desk again. She finally deigned to do it and we heard something about “When was it cancelled.” Michelle had been crying before now, but this really set her off, understandably. We felt like a ping-pong ball being batted around. No one seemed willing to take responsibility for our situation.

Unhelpful Woman sent us back to United, which took another half hour to reach. No one at the United ticket desk recalled having spoken to Lufthansa about our case, but it seemed the problem had already been rectified. Some kind soul had placed me and Michelle on a non-stop flight from Heathrow to SFO! We were actually going to get back sooner than we would have flying through Munich! We were both very happy. United even let us call our parents for free to alert them to the flight change. Nice people, those.

There were no further issues, and we got into SFO at 17:30. So good to be home!