Irregular Operations Re-Booking due to flight cancellation
We returned to the C17 United Club lounge to handle re-booking. You'll note that I say "re-booking" here and not "re-ticketing", although at the time we were non the wiser. . .
I knew we may be in for some challenges with the irregular operations situation given that we were traveling on reward tickets and that UA did not normally fly to Johannesburg through Sao Paulo. I was also little worried that we were going to be subjected to a downgrade to economy with little or no protection on our behalf given we were booked on a reward ticket and generally, there are challenges due to high demand in finding reward business seats to South Africa.
I had a hunch they would re-book us into a paid fare bucket but I didn’t know what routing they would propose, or whether they would attempt to stick us immediately back into any available Star Alliance business reward bucket "I" inventory based on currently available space. As we were waiting, I whipped out the laptop while we were standing in line and using the UA Club wifi, was lucky enough to find 2 Lufthansa business seats ORD to FRA and then FRA-JNB (Airbus 380) the very next day. I kept this information up my sleeve in case they proposed something bad.
As we approached the counter, I explained our situation of Johannesburg being the final destination and that Brazil was a means to an end, a method of getting to South Africa. The agent initially had no idea where JNB was or where it was situated. OH boy. This isn’t going to turn out well…
After a few keystrokes on the computer, I was asked “ What about Dallas?” – my brain immediately thinking, what carrier flies from Dallas to Jo-Berg? Did she mean United via Houston and Lagos? The Chicago accent was a little thick and I was corrected – “No – Dulles as in Washington DC”. Would we be interested in tickets departing IAD-DAK-JNB in paid revenue fare bucket? Of course- we accepted this prior to any mind changing and she started to work on our re-booking.
After about 20 minutes, and the last ones in line to be re-booked we were placed on a routing ORD-IAD-DAK-JNB. Turns out we didn’t need that Lufthansa booking after all. Although, it was really nice to have this information up our sleeve in case we needed it. I should add that by this time, this re-booking was being completed at 2:30 AM. While my wife finished this off at the counter, I got on the internet and started making alternate arrangements for our paid South African Internal flights. Since we needed to get to Cape Town, we had booked a separate paid ticket from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African Airways. We initially had a 5 hour delay between the reward and paid tickets, but with the flight cancellation, even that was not enough slack time in the travel plans.
As my wife returned with $42 USD in food vouchers and a hotel voucher, we eventually got booted out of the UA Club at about 2:45 AM as all the staff wanted to go home. United Club staff told us our luggages would be located, and re-tagged to Johannesburg. We asked for the bags back but were assured that the bags would be looked after. This was my second mistake in not being insistent on having the bags returned. We were given a new baggage claim voucher.
Not knowing what the internet situation was at the hotel we stayed outside the UA club and looked up numbers for SAA ticket offices to rebook our separate paid JNB-CPT tickets to a later flight which cost us $161 in change fees and fares differences which we would have to eat. We tried to change this ticket on line, but despite purchasing the ticket through the
www.flysaa.com website, the booking portal was being stubborn and refused to allow us to change the ticket. As the North American Ticket office for South African was well closed for the evening, we called the South African Airways ticket office in Johannesburg and had the tickets changed.
Concourse C at O’Hare is absolutely deserted at 3 AM. I’d been through here many times but never this quiet.
Intercontinental Chicago O’Hare
2 Double Beds Deluxe Room
We found the Intercontinental Hotel shuttle at about 3 AM and made it to the room for 3:40 AM. Nice place but we didn’t spend to much time there. Some others got booked with Embassy Suites and Best Western dependent on tier status and fare class. All were looking for the shuttle busses, which weren’t running at top frequency in the early morning hours. Many of the Brazillians on the flight didn’t speak English and my Portuguese isn’t what it could be.
On arrival to the hotel, they didn’t have any kings or queens left so we went senior citizen style with two doubles. Check in was relatively smooth with the UA voucher accepted with out issues. We were politely reminded of an 11 AM check out, which only meant a very short turn around. An inquiry of internet availability today? "That will be $16." I guess that's how you treat business travellers. No thanks for us...
Attractively and freshly designed rooms with fashionable, but neutral colours.
Lovely rain shower in the bathroom. This was the last decent shower we had on the trip until we returned to Europe.
Much nicer airport hotel than I would have expected. Nice and peaceful view in the morning from the room.
I left this place thinking that I would have liked to have spent more time here.
The downside of our re-booking, was that we had to get up early to take another positioning flight to get to our overseas one. The other passengers on the original routing to Sao Paulo were taking a 5 PM departure, whereas we had to get back to the airport for an 11 AM departure. We found the free shuttle, which ran every 20 minutes.
Taking a proactive approach in making sure our bags didn't get left behind, we checked with UA ORD check in desks. No news on bags or whether they had been re-tagged. Passing through security, we checked again with the customer service desks in Concourse B. “Sorry, can’t help you.”
We headed back through the tunnel again to Concourse C. Stopping by the United Club again, we re-checked at the counter where we were last night and were told “Both your bags are in IAD already”.
We contacted Aeroplan in Montreal Quebec to confirm continuation of original itinerary and non cancellation of remaining balance of the e-ticket based on missing one segment. We also called and contacted SAA USA office for seat assignments on the IAD-DAK-JNB legs. Maybe this was overkill re-confirming everything, but we decided to take a complete approach to avoid any more surprises.