If you’ve been following our blog for awhile, you may have noticed a trend.  There is a running  joke amongst our friends that we are a travel jinx. Basically, whereever we go, things tend to go sideways. For our flight to Rio, we were all packed and ready to go;  we got to the airport, checked in our bags, and were ready to hit the beaches of Brazil. While we were in the lounge having a drink, Fausto’s phone started buzzing wildly. It was from American Airlines… which is never a good thing. Turns out our flight was cancelled and rescheduled for the next day. Even though there are other empty flights going to Brazil tonight, we are stuck here because they can not pull our luggage once it’s checked in.  Apparently that’s the new policy.

I know flight cancellations and delays are part of the deal when you travel, but it is still a bummer. Instead of getting in at 6 am we won’t get there until 8 pm. When you’re traveling on a tight schedule, a day makes a big difference, we just lost 20% of our trip.  If the airline knew the flight was going to be cancelled why did they check in the bag? If there is an empty flight going to Sao Paolo, why can’t they remove the luggage and let us get on that flight. It feels like a better solution then keeping a whole lot of people stranded.  I didn’t get very satisfactory answers to any of my questions. This is starting to happen a little too often for my liking.  You would think that we are used to all these travel mishaps by now, but it’s still frustrating every time.

Their solution is to give us a few vouchers for a cab ride home and a nice breakfast in the morning, but that doesn’t really change the fact that we lost a whole day in Rio. This is the fourth time this year where there were issues with my flight and the second time it was outright cancelled. We love flying American and we are pretty loyal customers, but they need to improve their services and not have this happen so often.