So, the plan was to fly from NYC to Austin - stay for a few days to visit friends, family and get our rental property (which had recently been vacated) in order. We were then to fly to San Miguel de Allende (via Leon) in Mexico for a friends wedding. From there back to NYC. We arranged travel through continental.com buying a multi point ticket NYC-AUS-LEON-NYC.

Thursday night at midnight we are just getting packed up and I go to continental.com to check in online for our 9am flight the next morning. When I go to check in the site comes up with an error asking if I want to re-purchase the ticket. Very confused, I pull up my email confirmation and looked it over closely. Turns out I was supposed to fly out that morning!! I had it in my head that Friday morning was our flight, but in actuality I had put the date into the system wrong and our flight was Thursday morning.

I immediatley picked up the phone calling Continental to inform them of the mistake and get booked on any flight that next day. Upon talking to a few customer service reps and a manager, spending over an hour on the phone pleading my case, the answer was final. In order to get on a flight the next day I would have to cough up an extra three thousand dollars!! This was just simply unacceptable.

Furthermore, they informed me that in 20 minutes the entire itinerary was to be deleted from the system and all travel was to be for***d because it was a non-refundable ticket.

The representatives at Continental were completely unsympathetic and would provide absolutely no assistance. Finally, after prodding for solutions I found out I could reinstate the remaining legs of the ticket (minus the NYC to Austin route) for a $100 change fee per person. My wife and I were traveling so I coughed up the $200 bucks to at least get those flights secured.

Now, I had to find a way to get to Austin from NYC. I had a fair amount of OnePass miles and inquired about using those to book the ticket. Absolutely, they said we have plenty of room on the flight you thought you were supposed to be on (that they now wanted to charge me $3k for!!) so we can deduct the 50k miles from your account and put you and your wife on that flight. Oh, and there's going to be a last minute booking penalty of $75 each (or something similar... can't remember the exact figure). At this point I was feeling like I'd sooner buy a new ticket on another airline that give Continental another dime.

We both have premiere status on United so I gave them a call. Within 10 minutes of talking to a United representative she had us on a flight leaving the next morning to Austin flying through Chicago (our continental ticket was non-stop) with no last minute screw you charge. I decided to go this route and ended up booking mileage travel on United to Austin. The rest of our trip went fantastic (except for the 6 hour delay in Houston getting back to NYC on continental) and all was well. I just shudder to think that if we hadn't been fortunate enough to have a healthy balance in our mileage accounts we would have been absolutely screwed!

United scored serious points, while we vowed to never fly Continental again. One would think that Continental would see beyond the immediate screw fee and accomodate their customers (even a $300 penalty or something would have been minorly acceptable!) knowing that they will gain their loyalty for future flights.

To add insult to injury continetnal double charged us for the "change fees" to keep the rest of our flights intact and I had to spend an hour on-hold re-hashing the details of everything that happened to finally get it refunded.

I highly encourage everyone reading this to avoid Continental like the plague!