Travel Day - Start of new Vacation

Normally traveling to Bonaire takes about a day. It starts with an early morning flight from Ottawa ending at about 9:30pm in Bonaire. This trip was not going to be that easy for us.

The adventure started at 3:15am on Thursday morning when our alarm went off, which meant that we had about 3 hours of sleep. We got to the airport before 4:00am which was fine, but no one from the airlines was present. We got checked in and at the counter with Air Canada and proceeded through security and US Customs. While waiting for the plane Trudy checked the departure screen for the Ottawa – Washington leg, and noticed that our flight was scheduled for 45 minutes later than we thought. We checked our connecting boarding pass and it showed our boarding for the Washington – San Juan leg before we arrived in Washington, it had been re-scheduled to leave 40 minutes earlier, leaving us less than 30 to connect. We left Ottawa and arrived in Washington after our flight had left for San Juan. I checked the departure board and saw another flight to San Juan was departing in about 30 minutes, so we managed to get on that one. The wrinkle is that this flight had a stop in St. Thomas first, then on to San Juan. Up to now, even with this longer flight we still had lots of time to make the connecting flight from San Juan to Bonaire. Instead of a five hour layover, we still would have about three hours. We flew no problems to St. Thomas, where they would not let the San Juan passengers off. They boarded the plane in St. Thomas and taxied out to take off, but we didn’t. The pilot came on and informed us that there were mechanical problems and they would need to look into it.

By the time we landed in San Juan, we had missed our connecting flight and we had been on the plane for a total of nine and a half hours without being allowed to get off. The biggest problem for us was that we were changing carriers, so United was not responsible for getting us to Bonaire, just to San Juan. We were on our own for accommodation and as far as American was concerned we were just a customer who didn’t show up for a flight.

As our luggage didn’t make it to San Juan we went to the Baggage Claim office to track it down. They checked their records and it showed our luggage was scheduled to arrive on the 10:30pm flight later in the evening, so we decided to leave it until the next day to pick it up. The agent made a few calls for us to locate a hotel room, which typically runs $200 - $400 US per night. The hotel at the airport was fully booked, and he gave us a number for another hotel located in Old San Juan. We then proceeded to the American ticketing office to see what they could do about our missed flight. They indicated that the flight on Friday was fully booked but they had room on Saturday. It would be an $84 ticket cost change charge, plus the $100 change fee per person. They also indicated we should get to the airport three hours before the flight on Friday if we wanted to try standby. We decided to call the hotel to see if they had a room and wait until tomorrow and try the standby route. We were able to get the hotel and enjoyed a good sleep in San Juan.