Infinite loops, and other joys of airline mergers
I recently went on a trip to New York. The weather was surprisingly dry and cool the first two days I was there.
Unfortunately, the day I was scheduled to fly out of JFK was the day that now holds the record
for most rainfall at that airport. So, United Airlines called to let me know my flight had been cancelled. After
a lot of running around LaGuardia airport and talking to airline representatives, we decided our best bet was to fly out
the following day on a Continental flight. If you haven't heard, United and Continental are merging, and it seems
that at this stage they can assign customers to each others' flights if necessary.
After escaping the flash floods to the safety of my resting place for the night, I decided to print out my boarding pass. I went to Continental's web site, entered my confirmation number, and hit "return". This is what I saw (click the image to see a larger version):
And yes, clicking "Check in with Continental" did send me back to the exact same page as before, which instructed me to "Continue to United.com". So that was infinite loop #1.
The next infinite loop was the audio recording I encountered when I tried to call Continental to sort out this mess. I recorded a bit of the call, but feel free to play it over as many times as you like.
Technical difficulties
After hanging up and calling a few times, I was able to get through to a Continental employee, who put me on hold several times while she worked through what I can only imagine is a terrible mish-mash of two ancient computer systems to reserve me a seat on a flight back to the beautiful Bay Area. Even then, there was some last minute drama at the gate, as it seems the computer systems had trapped my ticket somewhere between United and Continental, outside the grasp of either one. Luckily, at the last minute, I was able to escape the infinite loop and get on a plane back home.
After escaping the flash floods to the safety of my resting place for the night, I decided to print out my boarding pass. I went to Continental's web site, entered my confirmation number, and hit "return". This is what I saw (click the image to see a larger version):
"Ok, I guess I will Continue to United.com", I thought.
Whereupon I was greeted with this page:
And yes, clicking "Check in with Continental" did send me back to the exact same page as before, which instructed me to "Continue to United.com". So that was infinite loop #1.
The next infinite loop was the audio recording I encountered when I tried to call Continental to sort out this mess. I recorded a bit of the call, but feel free to play it over as many times as you like.
Technical difficulties
After hanging up and calling a few times, I was able to get through to a Continental employee, who put me on hold several times while she worked through what I can only imagine is a terrible mish-mash of two ancient computer systems to reserve me a seat on a flight back to the beautiful Bay Area. Even then, there was some last minute drama at the gate, as it seems the computer systems had trapped my ticket somewhere between United and Continental, outside the grasp of either one. Luckily, at the last minute, I was able to escape the infinite loop and get on a plane back home.