[rewind] 7.7.13 - The Rough Start

   If you recall, we booked a 6 night cruise back in January and we have been anxiously looking forward to it ever since. Nicole had been checking for updates on our cruise constantly, and had been carefully reading every e-mail detailing important information about our trip. Unfortunately, Orbitz failed to send us the most important e-mail of all...

    On July 7 Dave was glancing over our paperwork one last time (which we had just printed) and noticed a "mistake". Our flight had changed by 9 hours, with an arrival time scheduled in Venice for 4 hours after our cruise was to depart. We frantically double checked our e-mails and confirmed that, indeed, we were never notified of this flight change. (Orbitz would later tell us that they sent out 5 e-mails with flight change notifications back in March...but they didn't). We were days away from our departure so we had to remedy the situation fast.

    To make a very long story short...

• We spent a total of over 10 frustrating hours (in a span of 4 days) on the phone with Orbitz customer service
• The only free-of-charge flight change offered to us was one that left two days earlier than planned
• Thanks to our hefty complaints for not notifying us of our flight change, we were able to get Orbitz to give us a $100 voucher to help with our new hotel costs
• In spite of the fact that we agreed to the 2-days earlier flight adjustment on July 7th, we were not given flight confirmation until July 10th (less than 12 hours before our departure)
• We successfully obtained tickets and flew out on July 11th, the day after the start of Ramadan (in fact, our landlord brought us our first fitr feast the night before our departure. yum)
• We promised ourselves never to book flights through Orbitz ever again

    Thankfully, we had no further flight complications. And in the end, we were actually pleased to have two extra days in Venice prior to starting our cruise. We will tell you how incredible Venice was tomorrow...

-David & Nicole