“Your flight was yesterday” the agent looked at me and obviously read the absolute confusion on my face.
“What”, I said, “here is my flight itinerary from Avianca and it clearly says that I’m leaving today” Annette, my traveling companion, looked at her flight itinerary and it was the same as mine.
The agent looked at it and spent what seems like forever tapping on the keys with an absolutely beautiful set of gel nails. She came back and said “Did you not get a notification that the flight is changed?”
We looked at each other and both of us simultaneously said “ No”. She said “That’s funny.” Interestingly enough it did not show up on her system as to when the flight changed.
She said “As of right now you don’t have a ticket!” We looked at each other in dismay, and then , she said “We can route you through Bogota at midnight.”
Apparently Avianca canceled the flight from El Salvador to Guayaquil without telling anyone. They actually put us on the flight for the previous day which in retrospect might have not been a bad idea because we would’ve had an extra day of vacation. Except… they didn’t tell us. They did give us 14 separate emails offering us the opportunity to pay extra to upgrade but that’s beside the point.
So here I am, sitting in the bar at the airport, waiting for eight hours for our flight to Bogotá and then onward to Guayaquil. Instead of a lovely rest and a leisurely morning getting to the airport in Guaquil, we now have an almost continuous flight with brief interruptions from Toronto to Guayaquil to San Cristobal in the Galapagos.
We did ask for a lounge pass as we would be here for another 8 hours. “No” was the response we received. Even an upgrade, would have been a nice acknowledgement of the disruption to our travel plans but my guess is that Avianca is operating on a bare bones budget.
I can’t figure out why Avianca systems operated this way; one would think that when you change a passengers flight – which is the case for our travel leg going from El Salvador to Guayaquil. It was canceled and that is why the system wanted us to leave the previous day.
With all these changes to systems and all the complexity of changing flights and layovers it’s no wonder that there is an increase in passenger air rage. Luckily the airport does not lack for bars.
Back in the good all days [oh my God! I sound like my parents], a passenger agent looked at your flight and made sure that everything was correct. Today, it appears that Skynet is about to disrupt the human race as they try to travel across the world.
Oh well, blame the pandemic. We do that for everything else that goes wrong.
@avianca, @aviancafail, @customerservicefails.
