Forced to Fly

Forced to Fly

I find myself in a most unusual place. Two years ago, when planning a motorcycle ride to Spain, I had the brilliant idea of buying business class seats through a specialized third-party vendor who promoted being able to offer business and first class seats far cheaper than otherwise available. That was appealing to me because when we fly internationally, we pretty much insist on going business class (our size being a significant deterrent to jamming ourselves into economy seats for extended periods of time), and business class seats always seem so expensive relative to economy seats. Sure enough there were some good deals to be had and so I booked seats via this reseller. Then, of course, COVID hit and we had to postpone our trip. As it turns out, we postponed it for almost exactly a year and planned to go this month (we would actually be coming home from that trip tomorrow, so this all feels very timely). COVID has wrecked havoc with all aspects of our lives, but none so much as global travel. At some stages of life, that might not be such a big deal, but as retired folks that had planned to regularly travel overseas, its a bit more of pronounced change of plans.

With the Delta Variant raging and booster shots not yet approved, we chose to once again postpone the trip for yet another year until September, 2022. I had rebooked the flights through the same agent and had to pay some fort of added amount to reactivate our differed points. I suspect it was some sort of fee to compensate the reseller for his trouble, and was mildly annoyed, but it was little enough to not force me to fight about it all. Then, when I emailed the third-party agent (actually the same guy I had booked through a year before), to say I had to once again cancel, that’s when things got interesting. He said he could do that, but that since the original tickets were originally booked and paid for in March of 2020, I only had until the end of March 2022 to use them. I pushed back to no avail. This guy is Russian and Russians are very hard to push around I find. Unlike the inscrutable Asians, who are demur and apologetic, Russians always seem to be secretly laughing at my woes. They are very direct and simply say that such and such is not possible. No is obviously a very common word to Russians because they use it so effectively and with such facility.

So, I took another route. These flights were on United Airlines, so I figured, maybe I can use them domestically. That would not be such a great deal for me, but it would certainly allow us to get a “free” ride to and from New York in First Class. Not possible. Boris (his name is actually Troy, but Boris works better for my story) was non-specific about how these had to be used only for European travel. It was as though he were challenging the scaredy-cat Americans to get on a plane and risk COVID by traveling over to Europe.

Then I got the brilliant idea of finding some friends who wanted to go to Europe and having the tickets transferred to them. I spoke yesterday with Gary and Oswaldo, who had come down from L.A. for a day-trip visit. They are anxious to get back on the travel bandwagon and were talking to me about their non-specific plans to go to Europe. I figured that was the ticket for me, and just to be safe and anticipate Boris’ next counter move (sounds like The Hunt for Red October) I asked if they could make work a flight to Barcelona and return from Lisbon. No problem. So I emailed Boris and matter-of-factory said I wanted to do just that. Not possible. The booking had to be for the same passengers, but he did say it could be made for any locations that United flew to in Europe. At least I now had a defined objective to get my money out of Boris.

That has led me to conclude that thanks to my choice of some crazy third-party vendor and their attempt to maximize their revenue at my expense, I am being forced to fly to Europe and enjoy myself before the end of March, whether I like it or not. Therefore, I have just thrown a question out to my gang (now officially Kim, Gary and Oswaldo) and asked who wants to plan a trip to Europe….maybe specifically Italy….for early next year? I have already heard back from the gang that they are all in on the program. It turns out that it only takes a little bit of force to cause this group to get on a plane and brave the COVID beast in order to be able to wander the streets of the Eternal City and beyond.

I have spent the better part of the last year pondering if my international travel juggernaut covering sixty-seven years has come to an abrupt but understandable end. It seems that putting some $7k in flight funding out to a third-party vendor is all it takes for me to break out of that rigor mortis. So, we will now plan a trip to Europe, not because we are driven to go, but because I am driven to not lose $7k to some slick Russian intermediary, who wants desperately to get the best of me. I’m sure we will enjoy it nonetheless, and maybe Boris is even doing us a favor by forcing us out of our COVID shell and back into the big wide world of international travel that we have always enjoyed so much.

What Boris has certainly succeeded in doing, however, it convincing me that third-party vendors may seem like a cost-effective solution, but that’s only the case when things go exactly as planned. Any time I have had to make changes to the itinerary or plans, I have always regretted being stuck in a third-party vendor situation. Just keeping track of the confirmation numbers alone is a whole rigamarole. The one exception I will make is to say that I have found booking.com to be a wonderful third-party vendor for booking hotels for road trips. By their very nature, road trips tend to get adjusted all the time (or at least ours do). The benefit of booking.com is that their free cancellation policy is so very easy and allows me to adjust my trip as needed. This is such a positive attribute that I only use booking.com to book my hotels and I tell everyone I know that they should use them for the same reason. By the same token, I would tell everyone I know NOT to use Boris and his outfit for booking cheap international business class seats for air travel. You will notice that I have not only chosen a pseudonym for Boris, but that I have refrained from mentioning the name of the service Boris represents. I guess I am wary of Russians and their retaliatory capabilities. It would not take Boris much effort to put a major fly in my international travel plan ointment, and who needs that?

So, Boris may have forced Kim and me to fly, but flying into the ointment is something even Boris would rather I avoid.