October 2, 2011: Changes, Changes

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. 

                                                     -Robert C. Gallagher

G'day mates!

It has been a couple of months since the last post, during which the inevitable happened--change. Every single one of our flights has changed in some regard. Most of which have had negligible impact, arriving 5 minutes earlier or leaving 15 minutes later, things like that. However, there were two major schedule changes that led to major shuffling of the schedule cards:

Sydney, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand

On the outbound journey we connect through Sydney to get to Auckland, NZ. Originally this layover was supposed to be about 5 hours long, with us arriving around 7 AM and departing to Auckland around noon. However, within a month of booking our flights, our international carrier had re-timed the departure from Sydney seven hours later than originally planned (7 PM). This means that not only would we have a 12+ hour layover in Sydney, we would not arrive in Auckland 'till after midnight, jet-lagged and all! After several months of working with our the website we bought our tickets through and the carrier we were finally able to get rebooked on a partner airline that reduced the connection time in Sydney from over 12 hours to about 3 hours enabling us to have some time in Auckland before leaving the following day for Rotorua. The key thing to note here is persistence. It literally took calling every couple of weeks to our travel website before we were able to agree upon an itinerary that met our needs and that the air carrier was willing to change to. This really was a case of the "squeaky wheel getting the grease" because of the persistent calls finally enabled the change

Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, United States

Recently, our international carrier retimed our return fights to leave Sydney two and a half hours later than originally planned. Excellent, right? Wrong. Unfortunately this two plus hour change in flight times results in a couple of connections likely being missed. That is unless we can turn into Superman and clear customs, recheck luggage, change terminals, and clear security in less than an hour (damn, I wish I could do that). On the plus side, this was a relatively easy flight to change around, since the carrier offered a flight through Melbourne (hey, another city, making a total of ten!) that arrived in plenty of time to make the U.S. connection. This requires an additional five hours of travel time (part of which is in a direction opposite to the USA), but it at least provides a viable solution.

So, persistence and flexibility were beneficial in dealing with these changes. Only the first of many more that I am sure will come as we embark on this adventure!