Flights of Fancy

With my trip to Tuscany less than a week away, i was somewhat dismayed to receive a phone call from United Airlines asking me to call them back with an appropriate reservation number. Why they couldn't email me to ask, i guess, is besides the point. Having never flown with United before, i wasn't sure what to expect, but never-the-less gave them a call back to see what the score was. The message had mentioned something about a 'schedule change' which in the past has meant an alteration of 15 minutes or so here or there and nothing much to worry about. I hoped it was to be the same here. I should be so lucky. My flights to Pisa go from Charleston to Dulles (Washington DC) to Munich to Pisa - quite a long route admittedly but the most convenient and cheapest (leaving at 2pm on Sat 16th or therabouts). Well, I was informed that my first flight had changed, i was now on the 7.15pm flight to Dulles. "Oh, and by the way, you're not going to make your connections to Munich and Pisa." (This was how it was phrased - i kid you not). Rather perturbed by this, i asked what could be done and was given two options - one to route through Chicago (not an option - Chicago O'Hare is renowned to be a nightmare) and the other to get an earlier United flight to Dulles at 10.22am.

Okay, so now colour me stupid here but given that i'd made the reservations and the connections as they stood, you'd think that i'd actually WANT to catch those flights. So why go through all this hassle to call me and have me get back in touch to faff around with flights when they coulda just put me on that flight to begin with. Not only that but two friends i am flying with - who would also be in that situation - were not contacted at all. So if it hadn't been for me hearing, they would've shown up at the airport none-the-wiser (as, indeed, would I) and had no option but to wait around for the later flight. So, after some much running around and multiple calls to my friends and back to United (I was unable to change there seats, so they had to sort it themselves), we FINALLY all got the mess sorted out. I can only hope now that the flights by United work a lot better than the ticketing!! Watch this space!