06.02.2024 Berlin - Paris

Today our second big trip to South America began. We have a lot of time to write right now because we have been sitting in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in area 2E K49 since 6:30 p.m. waiting for our connecting flight to Santiago de Chile at 11:20 p.m.! But it's good that we have so much time, because we had to overcome some problematic hurdles to get here! But one thing after the other: We had already registered our flights with our trusted travel agency in September, at a price that was almost the same as the previous year (see travel report from 2023). Of course we treated ourselves to the slightly more spacious Economy Plus class. The travel agency only made reservations and payment was to be made shortly before the tickets were finally issued. So we still had a few months to save up. We were on our own when booking the boat trip because that would have been too much of a hassle for the office and in terms of price it would have cost us more, as the advisor honestly told us. So we found a travel agent on the Internet (June 2023) for the trip with the "Hollandamericaline" from San Antonio (Chile) to Buenos Aires (Argentina), a 15-day cruise! But first the “flying adventures”:

Sometime in January we contacted the travel agency and, completely clueless, asked what to do next. We found out that our reservation had been canceled four days later because we hadn't contacted us. It is not the office's job to inquire about reservations. Phew, we were incredibly lucky and will definitely make written appointments next time! When we had everything in place, we were informed that seat reservations in this class now also cost €59.00 (€236.00). No matter, it was worth it to us, we had the tickets and our desired seats! That's what we thought! When we tried to claim our flight kilometers with "Flying Blue", we came to the Air France website and were urgently asked to provide our travel documents (passports), otherwise transport would be impossible. Why are you as a customer not informed about missing information? Didn't everyone involved have our internet addresses? While editing, we were able to clarify our desired seats for the flight to Paris (there are still seats available that don't cost anything to reserve, but not many left!). Now we believed we were finally in the green. But far from it! When we checked everything again the next day, we happened to find a message on the Air France website that our seats had to be changed for the long flight. Again no communication to us!,,We now had seats in a row of four, which we absolutely wanted to avoid and for which we had paid extra. Now the fun was over and what followed was a 1.5 hour contact with the airline. We don't know how much of that was waiting time in the telephone queue and waiting time because of questions to the supervisor and... and. But in the end there was a promise that we would get back our expenses for the reservation. We hope so! When checking for the long return flight, we discovered that the costs had suddenly been canceled here too, for everyone? Well, this part of our journey is still not over. Yesterday we found out that the BER ground staff would unexpectedly go on strike again (Wednesday, February 7th) and we were happy because then we would already be gone. When we checked the Air France website, nothing was written about the strike, but we were informed that our flight number (Berlin - Paris) unfortunately could not take place and that we should look for another possible flight. All that was left was to call the travel agency! Here we found out that the canceled flight number wasn't ours, that an Air France flight with that number didn't even exist and that tickets were still being sold for our flight! We should go to the airport, surely everything would work out!? When we wanted to have our boarding passes printed out in the Air France area, we were asked again about a scan of our passports; they were missing from the documents!? But then we had the boarding passes and also four banderoles for our suitcases. However, we only got rid of one suitcase each because the automatic belt refused to accept our second suitcase despite repeated help from an employee. We now had to go to the check-in counter and were sent into a queue that simply didn't move forward. Three young women with at least eight large pieces of luggage brought everything to a standstill. We could have queued in the priority queue, but we noticed this too late. When we finally got to it, all the problems were finally solved. Also our fear that we wouldn't make our time slot for the security check! And then the lady at the counter told us that we were entitled to go to the “Tempelhof Lounge”. With delicious food and a glass of wine, the digital relief was finally done. Incomprehensible!

There are also the exciting “battles” with the Hollandamericaline website, which also cost us a few hours and made us worried because logging in and checking in digitally didn’t work either. Since the travel agency constantly changed its phone number and didn't respond to our emails, we had serious fears as to whether the trip would even take place. This all ended in a phone call with Hollandamericaline, where a very friendly Dutch employee took care of everything for us and at the end we only had to print out the boarding passes and luggage tags.

Despite all this anger, I still don't believe in Karin's theory that, overall, this digitalization is good and that the problems are only with us and our incompetence. According to the motto: "We are simply too stupid and inexperienced to handle things properly!?"