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Sep 30, 07, 9:25 am
A friend of mine and I were set to meander off to Athens, Santorini and Mykonos for 2 weeks this September. We just returned and oh, what a trip...misadventures galore!
We were scheduled to do SFO-ORD-MAD-ATH on Iberia in J; stay 3 days in Athens then ATH-JTR (Santorini) on Aegean; 4 days, then Santorini-Mykonos on the Flying Cat fast ferry; Mykonos-Athens-Madrid on Aegean/Iberia, and after a 3 day planned stop in Madrid, home MAD-JFK-SFO.
27-Aug-07
Notified via e-mail by Iberia that our original AA coded flights have changed - we were scheduled on the 6:00AM SFO-ORD, to meet the 4:45PM Iberia flight. Due to schedule change they put us on the 9:00am SFO-ORD flight instead. Fine...except they never told AA this information. Foreshadowing, dum dum dum...
14-Sep-07
Arrive at airport for 9:00am flight to Chicago, carry-on bags only.
"Sir, you no-showed for the 6:30am flight; we have no seats on the Chicago flight, you'll need to go standby and due to a cancellation at 11:00am, it's way oversold." What ensued was over 90 minutes of back and forth with polite, helpful AA agents and RUDE, incompetent Iberia agents on the phone. The Chicago flight came and went; they had room for just one of us in the end, so we left it go. It also left an hour late, which would have blown our connection.
Finally Iberia agreed to re-route us SFO-JFK on AA, JFK-MAD-ATH. They made a mistake and booked us in A class (discounted first) on SFO-JFK - no matter as J was checked in full, as was economy. The AA agents take control of the matter as Iberia was unable to do anything, reissue the SFO-JFK portion and tell us "good luck in JFK with them." We board - the captain was waiting for us and they shut the door right behind me. Stored our bags and the adventure began.
Flight was fine - I don't remember much about the meal and was not impressed with a supposedly flagship premium product. But anyway, we arrived a bit early in JFK.
British Airways agents (ground handling for IB) were expecting us in JFK and had already printed boarding passes and had them waiting for us. Iberia flight boarded late due to ground congestion delaying its gate arrival. We finally left about an hour late and joined the long conga line snaking towards the runway. 90 minutes late, we departed, shorting our original 90 minute connection to...0 minutes. Sigh.
Iberia flight was fine - decent food, and I always love the BusinessPlus seats. Very comfortable for sleeping! Got about 4 hours sleep on the 6.5 hour flight. Arrived in Madrid approx. 1 hr behind schedule and ran like fugitives to find, at passport control, a 15 minute queue. Then, at connecting flight security in T4, a 20 minute wait - only one queue open of 10!
We arrive at the Athens departure gate - flight closed, manifest printed, our seats given away to other pax. We are rebooked 6.5 hours later on the evening Iberia flight and proceed to the SalaVIP lounge to sleep the drama off. At hour 5, our MAD-ATH flight is delayed an hour. Back to sleep.
We arrive at the gate in Madrid and find nothing short of shear terror taking place - the plane has been swapped down from a A321 to an A319 and in the process, 40 people have lost their seats. Instead of telling everyone about this, they proceed to board the plane without seating plan in coach - we were in business and our seats were protected (though we had to oust the Y pax who tried to take them on board). I have never in my life seen so many angry passengers fighting with each other; only in the end did it become apparent to the last 40 people that they had been screwed by Iberia's incompetence. We leave Madrid 90 minutes late. Sigh...
Flight comes and goes, we arrive in Athens after midnight and take a taxi to our hotel and collapse into heaps of rubble. What a horrible travel day! Could it get worse? Stay tuned...
19-Sep-07
Aegean Air flight ??
Dep: Athens 12:40pm
Arr: Santorini 1:25pm
Flight was delayed an hour and that's about all I'll say about Aegean; short flight, quick service, we arrived.
Santorini was really beautiful - we were staying in Oia on the sunrise view side of the caldera and in the evenings, the twinkling lights were truly dear. We had rented a cave apartment and it left much to be desired - dingy and not very well cared for. But nobody goes to Santorini for the accommodations. Days 1 and 2 are great - gorgeous weather, cool balmy evenings. Day 3 the weather turns on us - temps drop to the 50s at night, winds pick up to about 40-50mph. Foreshadowing, dum dum dum...
We check out of our traditional apartment and head to the ferry terminal...upon arrival, chaos! Ferries were cancelled two days in a row due to high seas and people were lined up for hours. Nothing going to Athens, nothing to Mykonos or any other island. Our ferry is listed as "delayed" with no further information as to when that might mean it's departing. We decide to leave and head for the airport - we had ENOUGH of the WIND and don't want to be stranded on Santorini.
Of course, then we weren't the only people who thought of that. All flights to Athens were sold out on Aegean and Olympic for 4 solid days - and the weather in Mykonos was just as bad as Santorini, which meant it would not have been the balmy warm island we were expecting. We begin weighing our options - the most obvious of which are not available to us (ferry to Mykonos or Athens, or flight to Athens). We could stay on Santorini a few days and wait it out. Then I spot a tour operator checking in her charter flight to........Stockholm.
I beg. I plead. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us two seats on your flight. We'll pay. We just want off the island. She isn't sure there will be room on the plane, so asks us to wait. At the last possible minute, she holds a meeting with the captain of the charter plane (Hello.ch, from Zurich, an MD-90) and decides it will be fine for us to join the manifest. In the process I helped "rescue" about 8 other passengers, who were very grateful for my assistance. We pay her, in cash, board the 70% full MD-90 and enjoyed a nice ride to Stockholm.
En-route we decided, not surprisingly, to change our plans and skip Mykonos. Too far to backtrack now, we thought, and anyway, we'd had enough of the wind and cold weather. If we're going to be cold, we'll do it in style in Stockholm! We decide to stay for 3 days in Stockholm then go to Madrid, catching up with our original itinerary. Thank God for trip insurance - that helped us recover some of the financial hit incurred by changing plans at the last minute like we did.
We arrive in Stockholm 4 hours after leaving Santorini and head for the hotel desk. We checked every single hotel within Stockholm, Arlanda (by the airport) and even Stockholm's close neighbors; not a SINGLE room available due to a major medical conference. Not one. I am Starwood Gold so call the Sheraton and ask if there is any guarantee I can invoke; "nope, sir, we are completely sold out and have a waiting list for Tuesday night." Sigh.
We then decide to drop the idea of Stockholm and get ourselves to another city in Europe. So we scan the departures board - plenty of options at that hour, 17h00. Nearly any city has flights - so we scribble down Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Rome and Zurich and head to the internet kiosk to see about rooms. Prague is fairly do-able but Amsterdam and Zurich have few rooms available. Vienna is do-able but too expensive, and then we check Berlin - I find my favorite hotel (the Swissotel on Ku'damm) has room for us at a great rate so we book it, run like fugitives to Germanwings in T1 (we were in T5), buy our last-minute tickets and 2 hours later were in Berlin.
We had a fantastic 3 days in Berlin - the weather was agreeable and cooperative. I may be in a minority of people who actually find Berlin beautiful - I think it's an underrated capital and really love how easy it is to get around the city on the UBahn. There are parts that are gritty, but considering the city's recent past, it's come a long way. The park is gorgeous, the avenues wide and graceful. The restaurants are good, too.
During the 3 days I booked us on an EasyJet non-stop flight from Berlin to Madrid and on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, we show up for our flight. Amazingly, it goes off without a hitch - I even would say EasyJet is comfortable, compared to Iberia, Lufthansa, SAS and many other EU carriers I've used in the past. The seats don't recline which is a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing as the already tight pitch is not further diminished by a seat in your face.
We arrived early in Madrid, made our way to our hotel, find they have cancelled one of our two rooms due to what they thought was a duplicate booking, and after arguing with the manager for 25 minutes get the booking reinstated. They were full that night so who knows how they managed that situation. We staying 3 nights in Madrid - we've been there before and knew exactly where to go and what to do. We took a tour of the Palacio Real which was very interesting, saw the Centro por Arte de Reina Sofia, housing the impressive Guernica work by Picasso, and all in all enjoyed 3 fine days in Madrid.
Time for our return Iberia experience...
29-Sep-07
IB6251
Dep MAD 1:35PM
Arr JFK 3:45PM
A340-300
BusinessPlus
We decide to check our bags as we had done a bit of shopping (mostly for warmer clothes in Berlin!!!) and didn't feel like hauling our rollaboards all the way through Barajas, onto the train, out to T4S, then onto the plane. While convenient, this decision would come at a cost to us later. Foreshadowing, dumdumdum.
The flight boards and leaves on-time; upon departure the menus are passed out. We read it and looked at each other with a "you've got to be kidding me" expression. What a sorry excuse for airline food! The descriptions did not even begin to describe how HORRIBLE that meal was. The starter was tuna marinated in oil - and it was grey, it looked like old cooked beef and tasted about the same. The main course choices were quail, turbot or grilled vegetables. I decided to get the grilled vegetables which were exactly that - about 9 small grilled vegetables in the dish. No rice, no sauce, no noodles. Nothing. Just grilled asparagus, carrots, three cherry tomatoes and an endive. My friend got the quail and once he saw it covered in a fairly thick layer of oil, declined to eat most of it. VILE. VILE. I have never had a meal that comes even close to the poor quality presented to us by IB. VILE.
The flight passes without much drama - we land 15 minutes early in JFK after an equally VILE pre-arrival meal, and head to collect our bags after going through immigration. And we wait. And wait. And wait. Nobody seated in BusinessPlus ever saw their bags come out so we ask and they say "the plane is empty, there are no more bags." So we go through customs to file a missing bag report and as soon as we do hear an announcement that they found another container of bags. GRRRH!
They tell us not to worry, they'll bring them through customs and get them onto our connecting flight, AA177, that afternoon. OK, we think, at least we and AA and IB know WHERE the bags are, assuming ours are among those in that wayward container.
We check-in for our connecting flight and get my favorite 767-200 seats - 11AB. I like them because they feel private and cocoon like, call me crazy. I also think they have more recline and more legroom. Flight boards on-time and leaves the gate a bit early, and we're off the ground in 10 minutes. Record time for JFK! Captain comes on and says we'll be 25-30 minutes early and to enjoy the flight. I gather my AAEntertainment Player and begin to watch a movie, then fall asleep. So did my friend; the flight attendants didn't think to wake us for dinner so we missed the meal altogether. They did not later stop by to see if we'd like a like snack, the salad, nothing. Oh well, I did not really want the meal anyway after the horrible experience of IB that day. As I was sleeping, about 3 hours into the flight, I was awakened by screams and violent shaking - and an alarming message over the PA "FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SEATS NOW, IF YOU ARE UP IN THE AISLES TAKE ANY SEAT RIGHT THIS MINUTE AND TIGHTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS"
That will wake anyone up. We were passing through, I assume, some thunderstorms and wow, were we rocking and rolling. It was strong enough for my head to come up off the pillow and fall back down; I was not strapped very tight and could feel myself lift up off the seat once. That did not last very long, but we did pass through a second area of similar turbulence about an hour later. I've flown a LOT in my young life - really, over 300k miles - and that would rate up there with the worst turbulence I've experienced.
Anyway, rest of the flight was unremarkable and we did land about 25 minutes early. We waited at the baggage carousel with now 10 of our closest friends (all from the MAD IB flight), and no IB bags ever appeared. We went to the baggage service desk en masse and politely inquired (after all, it wasn't AA's fault).
The explanation they gave was plausible and made sense - the BA agents (ground handling for IB) tried to get the bags to AA in time in JFK, but customs would not release that many bags all at once and wanted to scan them which obviously took some time. By the time they got them, AA decided it was too late to put them on the flight as it was closing and we are now supposed to get our bags today. Will see if that happens but, AA said that it happens "all the time" with IB. Why am I not surprised?
Overall, the trip was exhausting. All of the en-route reroutes, flight changes, ups and downs really weighed us down but we kept high spirits and really enjoyed it. We looked at it as an "Amazing Race" experience and while I'd not want to re-live it, necessarily, in the moment I do have to say it was kind of fun. It reiterated that both of us have travelled enough to know our way around difficult situations and have enough experience to base sound decisions on.
Consequently, the hotel we were due to stay in Mykonos is giving me a VERY HARD time about the cancellation and wants to keep the one night deposit. Due to our being completely UNABLE to get to Mykonos that day, I think that unfair and am going to fight it with my credit card company. Aegean Airlines - for our Mykonos-Athens segment - was happy to get the two seats back and gladly offered us a refund. Iberia on ATH-MAD would not give us a refund but did offer it as a credit, which is nice but I doubt we'll use it (especially within one year). And of course, Hellenic Seaways gave us a refund for the Santorini-Mykonos ticket.
Summary: IB gets a final :td: from me for their terrible ground handling capabilities, and VILE meals; I have previously been a big fan of their BusinessPlus but think I'll stick to LH/UA now on SFO-Europe. Germanwings and Easyjet get a ^ due to their inexpensive last minute tickets and really, decent in-flight product for a shorthaul segment.
We were scheduled to do SFO-ORD-MAD-ATH on Iberia in J; stay 3 days in Athens then ATH-JTR (Santorini) on Aegean; 4 days, then Santorini-Mykonos on the Flying Cat fast ferry; Mykonos-Athens-Madrid on Aegean/Iberia, and after a 3 day planned stop in Madrid, home MAD-JFK-SFO.
27-Aug-07
Notified via e-mail by Iberia that our original AA coded flights have changed - we were scheduled on the 6:00AM SFO-ORD, to meet the 4:45PM Iberia flight. Due to schedule change they put us on the 9:00am SFO-ORD flight instead. Fine...except they never told AA this information. Foreshadowing, dum dum dum...
14-Sep-07
Arrive at airport for 9:00am flight to Chicago, carry-on bags only.
"Sir, you no-showed for the 6:30am flight; we have no seats on the Chicago flight, you'll need to go standby and due to a cancellation at 11:00am, it's way oversold." What ensued was over 90 minutes of back and forth with polite, helpful AA agents and RUDE, incompetent Iberia agents on the phone. The Chicago flight came and went; they had room for just one of us in the end, so we left it go. It also left an hour late, which would have blown our connection.
Finally Iberia agreed to re-route us SFO-JFK on AA, JFK-MAD-ATH. They made a mistake and booked us in A class (discounted first) on SFO-JFK - no matter as J was checked in full, as was economy. The AA agents take control of the matter as Iberia was unable to do anything, reissue the SFO-JFK portion and tell us "good luck in JFK with them." We board - the captain was waiting for us and they shut the door right behind me. Stored our bags and the adventure began.
Flight was fine - I don't remember much about the meal and was not impressed with a supposedly flagship premium product. But anyway, we arrived a bit early in JFK.
British Airways agents (ground handling for IB) were expecting us in JFK and had already printed boarding passes and had them waiting for us. Iberia flight boarded late due to ground congestion delaying its gate arrival. We finally left about an hour late and joined the long conga line snaking towards the runway. 90 minutes late, we departed, shorting our original 90 minute connection to...0 minutes. Sigh.
Iberia flight was fine - decent food, and I always love the BusinessPlus seats. Very comfortable for sleeping! Got about 4 hours sleep on the 6.5 hour flight. Arrived in Madrid approx. 1 hr behind schedule and ran like fugitives to find, at passport control, a 15 minute queue. Then, at connecting flight security in T4, a 20 minute wait - only one queue open of 10!
We arrive at the Athens departure gate - flight closed, manifest printed, our seats given away to other pax. We are rebooked 6.5 hours later on the evening Iberia flight and proceed to the SalaVIP lounge to sleep the drama off. At hour 5, our MAD-ATH flight is delayed an hour. Back to sleep.
We arrive at the gate in Madrid and find nothing short of shear terror taking place - the plane has been swapped down from a A321 to an A319 and in the process, 40 people have lost their seats. Instead of telling everyone about this, they proceed to board the plane without seating plan in coach - we were in business and our seats were protected (though we had to oust the Y pax who tried to take them on board). I have never in my life seen so many angry passengers fighting with each other; only in the end did it become apparent to the last 40 people that they had been screwed by Iberia's incompetence. We leave Madrid 90 minutes late. Sigh...
Flight comes and goes, we arrive in Athens after midnight and take a taxi to our hotel and collapse into heaps of rubble. What a horrible travel day! Could it get worse? Stay tuned...
19-Sep-07
Aegean Air flight ??
Dep: Athens 12:40pm
Arr: Santorini 1:25pm
Flight was delayed an hour and that's about all I'll say about Aegean; short flight, quick service, we arrived.
Santorini was really beautiful - we were staying in Oia on the sunrise view side of the caldera and in the evenings, the twinkling lights were truly dear. We had rented a cave apartment and it left much to be desired - dingy and not very well cared for. But nobody goes to Santorini for the accommodations. Days 1 and 2 are great - gorgeous weather, cool balmy evenings. Day 3 the weather turns on us - temps drop to the 50s at night, winds pick up to about 40-50mph. Foreshadowing, dum dum dum...
We check out of our traditional apartment and head to the ferry terminal...upon arrival, chaos! Ferries were cancelled two days in a row due to high seas and people were lined up for hours. Nothing going to Athens, nothing to Mykonos or any other island. Our ferry is listed as "delayed" with no further information as to when that might mean it's departing. We decide to leave and head for the airport - we had ENOUGH of the WIND and don't want to be stranded on Santorini.
Of course, then we weren't the only people who thought of that. All flights to Athens were sold out on Aegean and Olympic for 4 solid days - and the weather in Mykonos was just as bad as Santorini, which meant it would not have been the balmy warm island we were expecting. We begin weighing our options - the most obvious of which are not available to us (ferry to Mykonos or Athens, or flight to Athens). We could stay on Santorini a few days and wait it out. Then I spot a tour operator checking in her charter flight to........Stockholm.
I beg. I plead. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us two seats on your flight. We'll pay. We just want off the island. She isn't sure there will be room on the plane, so asks us to wait. At the last possible minute, she holds a meeting with the captain of the charter plane (Hello.ch, from Zurich, an MD-90) and decides it will be fine for us to join the manifest. In the process I helped "rescue" about 8 other passengers, who were very grateful for my assistance. We pay her, in cash, board the 70% full MD-90 and enjoyed a nice ride to Stockholm.
En-route we decided, not surprisingly, to change our plans and skip Mykonos. Too far to backtrack now, we thought, and anyway, we'd had enough of the wind and cold weather. If we're going to be cold, we'll do it in style in Stockholm! We decide to stay for 3 days in Stockholm then go to Madrid, catching up with our original itinerary. Thank God for trip insurance - that helped us recover some of the financial hit incurred by changing plans at the last minute like we did.
We arrive in Stockholm 4 hours after leaving Santorini and head for the hotel desk. We checked every single hotel within Stockholm, Arlanda (by the airport) and even Stockholm's close neighbors; not a SINGLE room available due to a major medical conference. Not one. I am Starwood Gold so call the Sheraton and ask if there is any guarantee I can invoke; "nope, sir, we are completely sold out and have a waiting list for Tuesday night." Sigh.
We then decide to drop the idea of Stockholm and get ourselves to another city in Europe. So we scan the departures board - plenty of options at that hour, 17h00. Nearly any city has flights - so we scribble down Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Rome and Zurich and head to the internet kiosk to see about rooms. Prague is fairly do-able but Amsterdam and Zurich have few rooms available. Vienna is do-able but too expensive, and then we check Berlin - I find my favorite hotel (the Swissotel on Ku'damm) has room for us at a great rate so we book it, run like fugitives to Germanwings in T1 (we were in T5), buy our last-minute tickets and 2 hours later were in Berlin.
We had a fantastic 3 days in Berlin - the weather was agreeable and cooperative. I may be in a minority of people who actually find Berlin beautiful - I think it's an underrated capital and really love how easy it is to get around the city on the UBahn. There are parts that are gritty, but considering the city's recent past, it's come a long way. The park is gorgeous, the avenues wide and graceful. The restaurants are good, too.
During the 3 days I booked us on an EasyJet non-stop flight from Berlin to Madrid and on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, we show up for our flight. Amazingly, it goes off without a hitch - I even would say EasyJet is comfortable, compared to Iberia, Lufthansa, SAS and many other EU carriers I've used in the past. The seats don't recline which is a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing as the already tight pitch is not further diminished by a seat in your face.
We arrived early in Madrid, made our way to our hotel, find they have cancelled one of our two rooms due to what they thought was a duplicate booking, and after arguing with the manager for 25 minutes get the booking reinstated. They were full that night so who knows how they managed that situation. We staying 3 nights in Madrid - we've been there before and knew exactly where to go and what to do. We took a tour of the Palacio Real which was very interesting, saw the Centro por Arte de Reina Sofia, housing the impressive Guernica work by Picasso, and all in all enjoyed 3 fine days in Madrid.
Time for our return Iberia experience...
29-Sep-07
IB6251
Dep MAD 1:35PM
Arr JFK 3:45PM
A340-300
BusinessPlus
We decide to check our bags as we had done a bit of shopping (mostly for warmer clothes in Berlin!!!) and didn't feel like hauling our rollaboards all the way through Barajas, onto the train, out to T4S, then onto the plane. While convenient, this decision would come at a cost to us later. Foreshadowing, dumdumdum.
The flight boards and leaves on-time; upon departure the menus are passed out. We read it and looked at each other with a "you've got to be kidding me" expression. What a sorry excuse for airline food! The descriptions did not even begin to describe how HORRIBLE that meal was. The starter was tuna marinated in oil - and it was grey, it looked like old cooked beef and tasted about the same. The main course choices were quail, turbot or grilled vegetables. I decided to get the grilled vegetables which were exactly that - about 9 small grilled vegetables in the dish. No rice, no sauce, no noodles. Nothing. Just grilled asparagus, carrots, three cherry tomatoes and an endive. My friend got the quail and once he saw it covered in a fairly thick layer of oil, declined to eat most of it. VILE. VILE. I have never had a meal that comes even close to the poor quality presented to us by IB. VILE.
The flight passes without much drama - we land 15 minutes early in JFK after an equally VILE pre-arrival meal, and head to collect our bags after going through immigration. And we wait. And wait. And wait. Nobody seated in BusinessPlus ever saw their bags come out so we ask and they say "the plane is empty, there are no more bags." So we go through customs to file a missing bag report and as soon as we do hear an announcement that they found another container of bags. GRRRH!
They tell us not to worry, they'll bring them through customs and get them onto our connecting flight, AA177, that afternoon. OK, we think, at least we and AA and IB know WHERE the bags are, assuming ours are among those in that wayward container.
We check-in for our connecting flight and get my favorite 767-200 seats - 11AB. I like them because they feel private and cocoon like, call me crazy. I also think they have more recline and more legroom. Flight boards on-time and leaves the gate a bit early, and we're off the ground in 10 minutes. Record time for JFK! Captain comes on and says we'll be 25-30 minutes early and to enjoy the flight. I gather my AAEntertainment Player and begin to watch a movie, then fall asleep. So did my friend; the flight attendants didn't think to wake us for dinner so we missed the meal altogether. They did not later stop by to see if we'd like a like snack, the salad, nothing. Oh well, I did not really want the meal anyway after the horrible experience of IB that day. As I was sleeping, about 3 hours into the flight, I was awakened by screams and violent shaking - and an alarming message over the PA "FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SEATS NOW, IF YOU ARE UP IN THE AISLES TAKE ANY SEAT RIGHT THIS MINUTE AND TIGHTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS"
That will wake anyone up. We were passing through, I assume, some thunderstorms and wow, were we rocking and rolling. It was strong enough for my head to come up off the pillow and fall back down; I was not strapped very tight and could feel myself lift up off the seat once. That did not last very long, but we did pass through a second area of similar turbulence about an hour later. I've flown a LOT in my young life - really, over 300k miles - and that would rate up there with the worst turbulence I've experienced.
Anyway, rest of the flight was unremarkable and we did land about 25 minutes early. We waited at the baggage carousel with now 10 of our closest friends (all from the MAD IB flight), and no IB bags ever appeared. We went to the baggage service desk en masse and politely inquired (after all, it wasn't AA's fault).
The explanation they gave was plausible and made sense - the BA agents (ground handling for IB) tried to get the bags to AA in time in JFK, but customs would not release that many bags all at once and wanted to scan them which obviously took some time. By the time they got them, AA decided it was too late to put them on the flight as it was closing and we are now supposed to get our bags today. Will see if that happens but, AA said that it happens "all the time" with IB. Why am I not surprised?
Overall, the trip was exhausting. All of the en-route reroutes, flight changes, ups and downs really weighed us down but we kept high spirits and really enjoyed it. We looked at it as an "Amazing Race" experience and while I'd not want to re-live it, necessarily, in the moment I do have to say it was kind of fun. It reiterated that both of us have travelled enough to know our way around difficult situations and have enough experience to base sound decisions on.
Consequently, the hotel we were due to stay in Mykonos is giving me a VERY HARD time about the cancellation and wants to keep the one night deposit. Due to our being completely UNABLE to get to Mykonos that day, I think that unfair and am going to fight it with my credit card company. Aegean Airlines - for our Mykonos-Athens segment - was happy to get the two seats back and gladly offered us a refund. Iberia on ATH-MAD would not give us a refund but did offer it as a credit, which is nice but I doubt we'll use it (especially within one year). And of course, Hellenic Seaways gave us a refund for the Santorini-Mykonos ticket.
Summary: IB gets a final :td: from me for their terrible ground handling capabilities, and VILE meals; I have previously been a big fan of their BusinessPlus but think I'll stick to LH/UA now on SFO-Europe. Germanwings and Easyjet get a ^ due to their inexpensive last minute tickets and really, decent in-flight product for a shorthaul segment.