NP: Incubus, Light Grenades

So, the plan was to fly early on Thursday and Sunday to avoid most of the Thanksgiving travel insanity. The outbound flight was fine, but the plan fell apart on the way back. It turns out that, when US Airways and America West merged, they didn't do such a good job of merging their flight information. As a result, there was a US Airways version and an America West version of the flight we were on.

Now, lots of airlines have "code shares," where they call the same flight by two different names. That's not what happened here. The booking system actually thought they were two different flights. Two different full flights. You see where this is going, right?

We ended up volunteering to go through Las Vegas, get bumped up to first class for the Vegas to Chicago leg, arrive in Chicago five hours late, and get a pair of restricted free tickets. Of course, then we found out that a couple who didn't volunteer got the same deal, only with a $400 check instead of the free ticket (they only got one between the two of them, though), which, obviously, would have been a much better situation.

Still, when they asked for those last two volunteers, I didn't have much faith that we'd even make it to Chicago on Sunday if we didn't take the bait.

The most annoying part of the whole day was that US Airways acted as if this were a normal overbooking situation, and not a massively boneheaded mistake on their part. I'm definitely tempted to write a strongly-worded letter to see if I can get any more out of the airline, but we may have signed away our rights to actionable self-righteous anger when we took the deal.

I did win almost twenty bucks in the Vegas airport, though.