Nov 10, 2021 3 min read

Some of you might be old enough to remember when United Airlines launched its “Fly the Friendly Skies” campaign back in 1965. They later moved away from it, and I just read they relaunched it two years ago – right before the COVID-19 pandemic grounded flights for months and put the kibosh on flying for the better part of a year. Even though people flocked back to air travel over the summer, the airlines still haven’t recovered and several of them have had a couple of weekend system meltdowns resulting in thousands of canceled flights. They have blamed the cancellations and delays on weather, computer problems, air traffic control issues and illnesses. We all know it’s because they don’t have enough employees, so an issue with one flight delaying or canceling a crew leads to a domino effect that creates mayhem nationwide.

Let me tell you a crazy story about all of this from our recent vacation to Hawaii. Yes, it was amazing and, yes, I feel very fortunate and blessed to have been able to visit this beautiful part of the world! Our group of eight planned to meet in Maui, flying in from Pittsburgh, Detroit and Ft. Myers, Fla. Everything was scheduled very well until my five Florida friends got an email that their airline changed their outbound flight from Ft. Myers to Miami. A different CITY. They rented a one-way van since the return flight was back to Ft. Myers. That was the craziest airline move I had ever heard of until the next day, when our airline emailed us that they were changing our outbound flight by one day earlier. A different DAY. After several hours of conversations with airline customer service representatives who apologized profusely for them condensing the schedule, we wound up with flights in and out one day earlier, paying for a hotel one extra night in Maui and booking a room in Phoenix for an overnight layover on the way home (I am not kidding). The airline wouldn’t offer a cent toward either of those hotels. Since we used frequent flyer points to fly for free, we opted to make it work.

Fast forward to last month. Moments before boarding our outbound flight on a sunny morning, the gate agent announced it was canceled because we didn’t have a first officer for the crew. Many hours and another canceled flight later, we booked a last-minute one-way ticket on another airline for the next morning at an unbelievably low price. The funniest part is that our original airline lost our luggage even though we never left Pittsburgh airport! We went home, stuffed more clothes into our carry-ons and slept a few hours.

The next day, we arrived in Hawaii problem-free and – wait for it – our lost luggage arrived an hour before us on a flight from Phoenix!

You can’t make this stuff up.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.