Markus’ Blog

Apparently, writing about the itinerary for our upcoming trip just saved our behinds. This is what our printed itineraries say (from back in May or so, when we bought the tickets):

I looked online and discovered that Air Canada had changed the departure time for flight AC855 from 13:30 to 12:00. That, of course, means that the flight from Vienna to London on January 4 is not going to work out.

So, I phoned up Flightcentre and thought that their solution would be to make us fly out of Vienna at 7:05am on January 4 — which is precisely what we were trying very hard to avoid in May. Leaving Vienna at this early hour means getting up no later than 3:30am to make it to the airport in time. Not such a good solution.

Well, it wasn’t nearly as straight forward as I originally thought. It took several days of phoning back and forth between our Flightcentre representative and myself. Countless options were investigated and rejected. This was, I think the order of solutions:

1. Fly from London to either Ottawa, Edmonton or Calgary and connect from there to Vancouver — not much fun in the middle of winter in Canada; either one of these locations could be quite bad weather wise.
2. Leave Vienna at 7:05am and get up at 3:30am to do so — definitely not much fun for a vacation.
3. Leave Vienna at around 6:00pm on January 3 and lose out time in Austria — not very good, either, but definitely better than the other two options.
4. Leave London on either Saturday or Sunday, but without a direct flight into Vancouver; in addtion to having to change planes twice, we couldn’t even get the last leg into Vancouver confirmed and would have had to risk being wait-listed and not getting on — not good at all: two chances of getting stranded somewhere in Eastern Canada: weather and full planes.
5. And lastly, the version that we picked: leave Vienna at 10:15am like planned, stay in London till Monday and catch the direct flight into Vancouver then. Added benefit: two and a half days of sight-seeing in London.

Yep, that was not the most price efficient solution and it means taking an additional day off at work, but it’s the most “fun” one. And Flightcentre is still going to pay for the first night we are spending in London.

It took a while, but I think we finally managed to solve the problem in an acceptable way. Not ideal (a flight out on the Sunday would have been better), but none the less it’s going to be a good, fairly worry-less trip home. No changing planes on the East coast, no wait lists, no getting up at 3:30am. And extra time in London.