Last night my husband and I arrived to the Canberra, Australia airport. Our 5pm fight would have landed in Sydney, Australia by 6pm. At 9:40pm we were meant to fly from Sydney to Honolulu, then back home to Seattle. We should have just landed in Honolulu. Well... edit that, I started this post a few hours ago, so we would actually have been home by now. HOME
We boarded our plane yesterday. I had a whole row of seats to myself. Heaven! We pulled away from the gate... then pulled right back to the gate. đ There was a mechanical error. We all disembarked the flight. All 30-40 of us. This was on Virgin Australia at Canberra airport which is a TINY airport.
I went directly to the gate agent. I asked her to take our bags off of the plane and to move us to the other Virgin flight to Sydney that was leaving in an hour because of our international connection. She wouldnât do it. Said they couldnât take the bags off the flight. Me, my husband and one other lady had international connections. No one else on the flight did.
Kept asking Virgin to move our bags and our tickets. They wouldnât. Asked the on-site supervisor. She refused. Called Virgin and they were gonna do it. Said I should put him on the phone with the gate agent. But then the other flight closed and flew away.
Next I called Hawaiian Air. They are the airline for the Sydney-Honolulu-Seattle flights. They said they could change the ticket, but if we initiated the change we would would be responsible for the cost involved.
Our Sydney plane finally gets scheduled to depart at 8:30pm. We will not make our connection. The gate agent comes to tell me they will rebook all of our flights! And we will leave the next day. They take our bags off the plane in under 5 minutes. Literally it 100% took less than 5 minutes.
The gate agent says, âGo to customer service. Our disrupter team is rebooking your flightsâ. We head down and talk to the supervisor... Kelsie. She says we will put you on a flight to Brisbane mid day tomorrow. From there we will get you on a flight from Brisbane to Seattle. We will email you the new flight confirmation tonight... but it may help if you call Hawaiian. They donât always respond to us quickly.
So we head back to the in-lawâs, I get the email from Virgin... they only booked us to Brisbane with no flight to the USA!!!
I made calls to no avail, and slept poorly because I was so stressed. We ended up back at the Canberra airport by 10am hoping they could help us in person. Of course they couldnât. I spent the next 1.5 hours rebooking our US legs to depart from Brisbane. The Hawaiian Air customer service rep was hopeless. We sorted everything out with just 20 minutes to spare....
We did make it to Brisbane. And are here in the airport now. Flight to the USA is still over 4 hours away. However, the day turned around.
I will save that for a post when we get home.
