Our scheduled 90 minute trip from CLE to MSP last night turned into a 20 hour ordeal. First I got a message Monday morning that the non-stop at 6pm was cancelled; I called the Platinum line with minimum wait and they re-booked us on a connection through ATL.

At the airport in CLE we found out that the CLE-ATL flight we were on had been cancelled, and we had been re-booked CLE-LGA Monday night, with LGA-MSP Tuesday morning. The guy at the check-in counter would have non of this nonsense, he hacked on his terminal for a while and got us on a later flight to ATL, connecting to ATL-MSP around 10:30.

Before leaving CLE I got a message that the ATL-MSP was delayed by 30 minutes - in hindsight that notification was almost comical given the general chaos in ATL. Arriving in ATL we transferred from B to A concourse, just to find out 15 min before scheduled departure that there had been a gate change - back to B gates.

Then we got the 30 minutes trickle torture, pilots came, but no flight attendants were available, when the flight attendants were finally there the pilots left as they had been rescheduled, all the while delaying by 30 minutes at a time. Finally shortly after 3am the flight was cancelled and we joined the re-booking line that stretched from B19 all the way to B11 at times. It looked kind of fishy all along, as the gate agent was handing out the flimsy red blankets we all love, all the while moving the departure time 30 minutes at a time.

So, back to the Platinum line, this time with an offer of a callback between 2 and 3 hours. I knew better and stayed on hold, after about 30 minutes I managed to re-rebook for a non-stop ATL-MSP, after turning down several routings such as ATL-LGA-SDF-MSP. In the end I managed to stand by for the 8:45 ATL-MSP non-stop, which my wife was confirmed on, and nobody knows how she got on there. That flight left with several empty seats.

I figure with the $200 voucher we made about $10/hour, but my wife missed a day of work and I spend about $40 on incidentals. So make that $8/hour, not quite minimum wage, depending where you live.

Come to think of it, this is almost a trip report, all that is missing are the pictures, but believe me, you don'y want to see pictures of the chaos in ATL.