It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, As pretty as an airport. - Douglas Adams
And weve spend quite a bit of time in airports the last two days! If you read my last blog, you know we were concerned about making our standby flight from Rome to Vancouver. Spoiler alert, we missed it 😢. But, first things first, back to our last morning in Rome.
The morning started with an email from WestJet saying our flight to Rome was delayed (an hour or so). We werent concerned about that, since there were several flights from Calgary to Vancouver we could take (we had to connect in Calgary). As long as we made the flight from Rome to Calgary, wed be fine. We were up, showered, breakfasted, and all packed up ready for our taxi to the airport at 10:30. Beth popped out to revisit a church she particularly liked, and while she was out she got croissants for us all for breakfast. Last breakfast of croissants for us for quite awhile! We had private transfer for the around 45 min trip to the airport.
at the airport was quite strict, even requiring people to take off their watches (I didnt, so was delayed a bit). We eventually got through, wandered through the duty free, and met Ross and Beth on the other side. We eventually found a place to sit down and have a bite before the flight (I had tuna and sun dried tomatoes on crostini, quite nice). Then we made our way to the gate (after being ignored by the staff in the Pandora shop - I must say, in our limited experience, sometimes customer service has been crap in Rome).
We had to wait around until all the people were boarded, before seeing if there were any seats for us. I was quite anxious waiting. There were two stragglers, who just barely made the flight, and if they were a couple of minutes later we would have been on. In the end there was one seat available, but I didnt want to leave Susan on her own, and just couldnt make the last second decision to go, so our checked bags were taken off, and we scrambled for what to do next. It was pretty stressful, I can tell you!
But some good lessons learned for standby travel, now I know we have to have considered things like does one of us want to take the flight if there is only one seat. Susan had looked into flying from different destinations, of course, in the days leading up to our departure from Rome and we saw the available seats dwindling. Unfortunately the next flight out from Rome wasnt for two days (we were leaving Friday and the next flight was Sunday), and we really didnt want to spend two more nights in Rome. I loved seeing what we saw in Rome, but we just werent prepared for more time there, and we both wanted to leave. The best option was flying out of London (WestJet flies out of Barcelona and Paris too but there were no seats available on those flights). So we decided to buy tickets on an EasyJet flight to London Gatwick Friday evening, then fly home on WestJet from Gatwick on Saturday. Unfortunately the cost of the standby tickets from Gatwick was WAY more than the cost of standby from Rome (we have to pay taxes and fees and the price greatly varies from country to country),
and of course we had to pay for the last minute flights to London. So maybe not the wisest choices, financially, as it turned out, but these are experiences you have to go through to learn how best to handle standby, and now we have some experience under our belts. This is the first time we havent been able to get on a standby flight.
Susan called the standby line to book our new tickets home, and then we checked into all the various flights on our phones, and went to pick up our bags which had been taken off the flight. It was odd going backwards through the airport! We had a couple of hours to wait before the EasyJet desk opened, but once it did and we dropped our bags, things improved. We breezed through security with an odd sense of deja vu (didnt we just do this a couple of hours ago?).
