RobinNZ
Sep 24, 06, 1:23 am
I have occasionally wondered over the years, and more particularly in these days of on line booking and electronic ticklets, what would happen if you arrived at the airport all ready to travel and then you discovered that you weren't in the computer. Well, I found out this month, when we arrived at the ANZ business class check in at Auckland ready for our flight to Honolulu. We handed over our passports as we normally do to be greeted with "No. Sorry. You and your wife aren't on our passenger list for today's flight" This was a bit of a mystery, so we produced our electronic ticket issued by Air New Zealand showing that the flight was indeed confirmed and paid for way back in January. "You didn't ring up and cancel it?" they asked. "No" we said. "We had no reason to contact the airline since making the booking"
The assistant tried to contact her supervisor by phone but no one was answering, so she took the ticket and vanished into the back office, re-appearing some 10 minutes later with the news that an "agent" had cancelled the booking three weeks previously. We again reassured her that we had made no contact with anyone in the company regarding the booking, and curiously when she looked in her computer our return booking HNL-AKL was still in place- so only the outward sector had been cancelled.
She managed to find us a couple of seats for the flight and we parted on amicalble terms, but as we clutched our boarding passes for 1A/B and made our way up to the lounge we couldn't help pondering what would have happened if business had been full - would we be sitting in econ - and if econ has also been full, would we have been waiting for the next flight later in the week. How, we also wondered, could an mystery agent inadvertantly cancel the first sector of an itinerary that he/she had not previously worked with and not notice something amiss?
However, after the inital hiccup, both the flight there and the return back to NZ were Air New Zealand at their finest with very friendly and efficient staff who couldn't do enough for us.
The assistant tried to contact her supervisor by phone but no one was answering, so she took the ticket and vanished into the back office, re-appearing some 10 minutes later with the news that an "agent" had cancelled the booking three weeks previously. We again reassured her that we had made no contact with anyone in the company regarding the booking, and curiously when she looked in her computer our return booking HNL-AKL was still in place- so only the outward sector had been cancelled.
She managed to find us a couple of seats for the flight and we parted on amicalble terms, but as we clutched our boarding passes for 1A/B and made our way up to the lounge we couldn't help pondering what would have happened if business had been full - would we be sitting in econ - and if econ has also been full, would we have been waiting for the next flight later in the week. How, we also wondered, could an mystery agent inadvertantly cancel the first sector of an itinerary that he/she had not previously worked with and not notice something amiss?
However, after the inital hiccup, both the flight there and the return back to NZ were Air New Zealand at their finest with very friendly and efficient staff who couldn't do enough for us.