With our strange and twisted travelathon route mostly all sorted by STA we just had to plan how to get from Bermuda to Cuba. Having checked out a huge array of around the world tickets in the STA office none of them would go anywhere near Cuba! Disappointing, but no problem we thought, we’ll just book that bit on line ourselves, how hard could it be in this day and age!
I was assigned the task, my wonderful girlfriend having taken the brunt of the planning so far! So I sat down, and fired up Wikipedia (now Wikipedia is my top top tip for anything and definitely for travelling). Wikipedia perhaps doesn’t immediately spring to mind when it comes to travelling and booking flights but do a Google search for “Flight to so and so” and you end up using valuable clicking time being lead of on a wild flight chase to all sorts of places. My top tip is to search for the airport you are leaving from. They’re all on there (bet you a pint you can’t fox it!*) even tiny Aitutaki Airport, one of our stops in the Cook Islands. Find the airport on Wikipedia and go to the section “Airlines and Destinations”, they all have this section too. There you can see every airline that goes to the place you wanna get to (or you can easily find out if you’re stuck with no direct flights) and wikipedia even links off to every one of their websites. Just go to each and compare the schedule\price yourself. Brilliant. Also you get to familiarise yourself with the airport with pictures maps etc, scary statistics like how many crashes they’ve had etc etc! Even better!
Back to Cuba, it seamed Castro was getting in my way from the grave, the US embargo was working ruthlessly well! Go into any travel agent in the UK and I bet there will be glossy adverts for any kind of adventure in Cuba, indeed, try and book a flight from the UK to Cuba and you’ll be welcomed with open arms. Now try and book one from Bermuda to Cuba! Or, as the only way on or off Bermuda is via Europe or the USA, try booking one from the USA to Cuba. It’s just not possible. The USA trade embargo on Cuba is soo tight, you just can’t do it. After a lengthy search we were either going to have row the few thousand miles after stealing some unfortunate persons rowing boat or do what the Americans do and sneakily go to Mexico and buy a flight there for cash.
That just can’t be right I thought, I’m not American and don’t live in American surely I can buy a flight on line between Mexico and Cuba? Wikipedia told me what airlines fly between Mexico City and Havana, it looked like it was just Mexicana Airlines. Off I went to their website, brilliant I could select Mexico City and Havana, submitted the search got the price and then, doh! You can’t book that flight without a Mexican Credit card “call customer services for more info”. The number was Mexican. Having no Spanish I was bit apprehensive about calling Mexico. A big Google search for alternatives later and no joy. I called Mexico. Not a good start, the automated menu thing was only in Spanish. I assumed Sales would be number one so pressed one, a second later and I had the embarrassing moment where you start the converstion straight away with a slow “Do you Speak English”. So uncultured! Might have managed a solitary “Hola” maybe. I forget. The person on the phone could kind of speak English which was more than I could do with Spanish of course and we tried hard to work it out, we got the right flights, the times and dates OK then the card number then came the address and email. That just didn’t go well at all. I wasn’t convinced we’ got the names or address right and my attempt to spell these just wasn’t working at all. I put the phone down not expecting anything good to happen. I attempted to email the airline to confirm what I had said but no email address. Then I found an American office for the airline and called them right away, all very good until I mentioned Havana at which point I was swiftly directed back the Mexican office. They couldn’t even look up any booking made to Havana. OK I’ll wait a few days and see if I get charged. Nothing came through. Called them up, no record of the purchase, hmmm, no email address to send to either.
Plan B: what was I thinking? I work in a place where pretty much every language under the sun is spoken, I’ll get a Spanish speaker on the job. The lovely Teresa offered to help and we called Mexico again. Booked the flights and gave the card details and address, great, I’ll wait for the confirmation, no problem. Few days later and nothing not a sausage!
Plan C: OK, I’ve got this fancy American express card that’s supposed to be able to get me out of anything, let’s give it a go. OK they found the flight, and the flight on the right date and time, great, but doh! They can’t book it. Now I’m v concerned. They go off for a while and come back. I could call the Amex office in Mexico City and they might be able to do it for me, could transfer some funds or something or go down the road and buy me the tickets for cash? I shy away from calling them up and trying to explain that all over again. Kinda too frustrated for that kind of thing right now.
Throughout this I hadn’t really considered calling STA again first because Cuba was a such a no-no on the around the world tickets and second it just didn’t seem possible if you weren’t in Mexico physically. I even did a quick tour of local travel agents and basically got told (with a smirk sometimes) that as I hadn’t booked the whole trip with them they wouldn’t help (even after what I thought was some very reasoned debate on my part sometimes). That really was the last straw. Wait till the recession hits them! Then they’ll want my money!
Hmmm sooo maybe as these agents weren’t saying they couldn’t do it, the one that booked our trip could? Bizarrely only now did I pick up the phone to Julia at STA in Brighton and pop the question. She’d call me back. I called her back, she was with a customer as usual! She called back late in the day with good (ish) news. They could get the flights! Not quite the same flights but near enough, we’d have to rearrange our itinerary and spend much more time than we wanted in airports but hey! We were going on Holiday! I jumped at the tickets and all was set. Feeling rather happy I went off home with the good news. See… I could could sort travel plans out!
About 7pm the mobile went, it was Julia again, she’d found the exact flights I wanted originally, same prince, all sorted! I wasn’t expecting that!
PS. Still no being paid by STA, although it might look like it :-)
