Man, this is weird. I booked a really cheap flight with United to go to Germany – it was $464 (313 EUR). But I learned some days later that I am supposed to attend an important meeting at the Oak Ridge National Lab … which is scheduled to happen during the first two days of my planned trip *argh*. We went back and forth and were not able to change the meeting time (due to very weak reasons in my opinion). So I had to change my travel plans – which turned out to be a week-long odyssey. Man, those airline ticket pricing policies are *totally* weird. After hour-long online searches, I found a flight from Knoxville to Dresden to Indianapolis for $495 from the 3/18 to the 4/7. Believe it or not, round-trips from Indianapolis were more expensive (I don’t get it). The change fee was $200 + fare difference so still acceptable.
Yes, my ultra-cheap ticket turned out to be $695 at the end … oh man … don’t remind me of this fiasco. And I lost the excellent seats that I reserved for the original flights. I’m now sitting in middle seats :-(. And I could not change the itinerary online (even though it worked yesterday) – so I had to call the hotline. I was even able to talk to somebody after 30 min music … the lady was really cool. A 3rd generation US-Japanese living in Hawaii – she even spoke Japanese (more than I do). And we talked for 30 minutes about Wakame soup (there is apparently some kind of canned Wakame that goes well with cucumber :-D). I tried to leave positive feedback, but United hung up :-/.