On Saturday, March
17, 2012, 19 students, my wife and I, were scheduled to fly from Guatemala City
to Mexico City through San Salvador, TACA airlines’ hub. What a harrowing
experience we had. We arrived in plenty of time to get the group through check
in, but when our first student reached the counter, there was a long delay so I
went up to investigate, and the woman trying to check in our student said that she
could not find our electronic ticket number for the trip. I gave her several
other names of members of our group, and she found some information about us.
She saw that we had been on our flight from Washington, D.C, to Guatemala City,
and could see our return trip from Mexico City to Washington D.C. through San
Salvador, but she could not find the portion of our trip to get to Mexico—where
we were hoping to go.
After searching for some
30 minutes, she found our names as being reserved; she just could not find our
e-ticket number, and therefore could not confirm that we had paid for the
flight. She asked me for our reservation number, and I knew I had packed it and
knew exactly where it was, but I couldn't remember which suitcase to find the
folder. With all the activities of the last day in Guatemala, who would have
thought enough to put that number right with my passport, anyway? Electronic
tickets are so handy and I’d never had to produce such a number before!
Rather than search
through Esther and my three suitcases, we decided to call our agent MTS Travel’s
number on our itinerary. I don't know who I talked to, but she had a very heavy
accent and the airport was so noisy that it was REALLY hard to hear OR to understand
her, and she got very frustrated with me when I made her repeat stuff. The TACA
employee tried several of numbers that MTS Travel gave to no avail. One of the
numbers MTS gave turned out to be the reservation number for the group that I
was located in a file somewhere in one of our suitcases. Unfortunately, that
number did not produce any results at the counter either. Finally, realizing
that we DID have seats reserved, and that there were only a few minutes
remaining to be able to board the plane, a supervisor decided to check us in,
saying that we would be re-issued e-tickets from the central office in San
Salvador to solve the information gap on their computers. They hurried us
through check-in and we rushed through security and we got to the gate just as
they had begun boarding. The plane took off only a few minutes behind schedule.
It’s a good thing they rushed us thorough check-in because a preliminary
weighing of our bags revealed that about one-third of our group’s bags were
overweight. Lots of souvenirs bought in Guatemala!
I breathed a sigh of
relief as I settled into my seat. It would have been one thing to be in the
situation I was in if I had been traveling alone, but being in that situation
with 20 other travelers was nerve-wrecking to say the least. At one point
TACA’s ticket counter employee asked me if it would be all right for us to take
a direct flight to Mexico City at 8pm that evening since our problem was
unsolvable to get on the current flight, and that would give them more time to
work it out. I hoped to avoid that if at all possible—I couldn’t imagine
entertaining a group of 19 tired, hungry, potentially grouchy students for 12
more hours at the airport in Guatemala City. I also hoped to avoid trying to
call Mexico to change arrangements for our pick up without having a phone with
me or access to the Internet.
But the story
doesn’t end there. We were only headed to San Salvador, and we had to change
planes there to get to Mexico City. As part of our check-in process, we had received
boarding passes for our Salvador-Mexico leg, but when we started to board, they
saw a “show ticket” warning on the boarding passes and stopped us again at the
gate. Apparently TACA’s San Salvador central office had done nothing, and we
were again in limbo. For some unknown reason, I had shoved into my pocket a
piece of computer-print-out gobbeldygook from my interchanges with the airline
agent back in Guatemala. How I remembered that piece of paper in my pocket, and
was aware enough to hand it over to the agents at the gate, I will never know. Why
I hadn’t thrown it away somewhere between Guatemala and the long concourses at
the San Salvador airport, I will never know either. Apparently those funny
configurations of numbers, letters and explanation points must have made sense
to the TACA counter agents in San Salvador, or perhaps they made sense to the
computer, because after they started plugging them into their computers, they
worked like magic. We were on the plane to Mexico.
My sigh of relief as
I now settled into my seat must have been heard around the world. We were
rewarded for our ordeal after arriving to the airport in Mexico City. We had a
two-hour inter-city public bus ride ahead of us to get to Puebla, our final
destination for the next five weeks. Entering the bus we were handed a plastic
bag of free snacks including one of my favorites from Mexico, Japanese peanuts,
and a free drink of our choice. There was also free Wi-Fi for the trip, so I
quickly checked the Phillies score on my iPod, then turned on some music and
closed my eyes—relieved and contented. As we traveled through the pass between
the two snow-capped volcanoes, Popocatépetl and
Iztaccíhuatl, I sent
a prayer of gratitude heavenward; not only for getting through the computerized
messes at the airports, but also for keeping us safe along the way.
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