By Al (New BonaireTalk Poster - Post #5) on Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 10:16 am: |
To start with Bonaire was awesome. All of the trouble that we had was with the airlines. It ended up costing us over $2000 extra to get home and it took us over 40 hours to get there. We are temporarily living in Rio de Janeiro so getting to Bonaire is a task even when everything goes well. Well, on our trip home nothing went well. We showed up at the airport at 1:00pm Thursday to catch the 3:00pm DAE (Dutch Antilles Express) flight to Curacao and were told that the 3:00pm flight had been combined with the 5:00pm flight because there weren’t enough people booked. This would tighten things up but was OK because our connecting flight from Curacao to Bogota didn’t leave until 7:00pm. I had informed the DAE ticket agent that we had to make a connection when we checked in at 1:00 so at 4:45 I get paged to go to the DAE office upstairs. When I get there the lady tells me that the 5:00 flight is not going to leave until 5:30 or 5:45 and that she will try to contact Avianca and advise them that we will be close. Well 6:00 roles around and the airplane isn’t even on the ground in Bonaire.
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By Kevin W. Williams (Pink Beach Properties (Experienced BonaireTalker - Post #496) on Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 5:00 pm: |
One very important lesson to learn from your sad experience ... never fall for the "well, I can get you to Bogota, but the Bogota agent will have to finish the job" story. What happened was the Curacao agent hit the same problem with your ticket that the Bogota agent did, and, instead of working out how to fix it, just passed it on to the next agent. If it's different airlines, sometimes this can be necessary, but when it's two agents for the same airline, it's trying to not be the one that has to fix the problem.
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By Dave (New BonaireTalk Poster - Post #8) on Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 5:14 pm: |
And I thought my last flight to Bonaire was bad when AA/Eagle left all of my luggage in San Juan for a week.
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By Al (New BonaireTalk Poster - Post #6) on Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 5:45 pm: |
All of our luggage made it both directions. That was my biggest concern at the beginning of the trip. LOL
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By michael gaynor (Supreme BonaireTalker - Post #2985) on Monday, March 31, 2008 - 8:33 am: |
Hope you charged your tickets on Amex. You can dispute the charges and they generally will back you.
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By Bob Banker (BonaireTalker - Post #28) on Monday, March 31, 2008 - 8:42 am: |
Would trip insurance have helped with the costs?
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By Al (New BonaireTalk Poster - Post #7) on Monday, March 31, 2008 - 10:27 am: |
I charged the tickets to MC. Have been on the phone with them but don’t know what will happen.
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