James's Weblog

We originally had a flight at 9:55 PM yesterday night from San Jose to Boston with a connection in New York. JetBlue calls us on Sunday afternoon to tell us that our flight is cancelled and to reschedule through their website. By the time I get home to get online, the next available flight it offers me is four days later, arriving the day after Christmas. Lame. The website also offers to give me a refund, which is useless with such short notice.

I call JetBlue to see if there’s anything else they can do (maybe put me directly on another airline?), but they say no and that the Thursday flight is my only choice. Sigh. (Can’t some of the passengers on the next day’s flight be bumped off to make room for us? Is it really more fair to screw some passengers a lot rather than screwing a lot of passengers some? Debatable, I suppose.)

After I hang up and start looking at other airlines’ offerings, I realize that I have two other major airports at our disposal: Oakland and San Francisco. The JetBlue web page for rescheduling cancelled flights doesn’t allow departing from a different airport, but attempting to a book a flight direct from Oakland to Boston shows that there are available seats on a 9:15 PM flight that night. I call JetBlue back, ask if I can be put on that flight, they confirm that will work and reschedule me, noting that the flight is delayed to 11:05 PM.

After I hang up, I decide to check the flight status to see if it’s delayed any further. JetBlue’s website says that it too is cancelled. What? Did the agent just reschedule me to a cancelled flight? The website still lets me book seats on that flight. I check again an hour later, and now it says that the estimated departure time is now 10:45 PM but still claims that it’s cancelled. (Why is the departure time changing to a supposedly cancelled flight?) I call JetBlue back and ask. One agent says that the flight does appear to be cancelled. Another agent says that it isn’t. I tell each of them about the conflicting information, they put me on hold while they double-check, but I get disconnected before either can get back to me.

I check with Oakland Airport. Surely they’re the final authority on knowing which flights are actually departing from their runways. Their website says that the flight is not cancelled and that it’s scheduled to depart at 11:30 PM; I call them to confirm, and the lady there says 11:05 PM. (She also explains that the flight was cancelled earlier that day but that they decided to go through with it after all.) Even when we show up at the airport, the departure time at the gate says 11:10 PM, but the airport’s computer screens say 11:20 PM. Wacky.

Our flight actually did manage to leave (at around 11:30 PM), and we did manage to arrive. Phew! It could have been a lot worse (and was for a lot of other people).