Day 15 - More Heathrow Drama

We are HOME! 3 days after we were supposed to be, but we are just happy to be in our own bed finally. But it wasn't cut and dry...

We woke up semi-later than usual since we had business class check-in and only had to walk 5 minutes to the terminal from the hotel. After repacking for the 500th time, we weighed the bags (one came in at 49.7 lb!!) and headed to the Terminal.

With 2 hours before boarding, we waltzed into the business class check-in line and were almost immediately helped. This is where things went sour. The agent could see us, our assigned seats, and all of that jazz. But she couldn't find out actual tickets! If you read our post on Friday, remember how we had a flight booked for Monday and then changed it to Sunday? Apparently they changed the flight but never reissued the tickets!! So we only had tickets for Monday's flight still!

This is where our travel hacking fell apart. It might a little difficult to follow along, sorry. See, the tickets were booked through Chase Credit Card rewards, for a booking through American Airlines, on a British Airways flight. To her credit, our check-in agent tried to get us tickets for the flight, but the ticketing agent she called couldn't get the system to release tickets because the booking was handled by American Airlines. She told us to find the American (I'll call it AA) ticketing desk and get the ticket released there. But it was in Terminal 3, and we were in Terminal 5!

Cue us RUNNING with all four of our bags to the train station, taking a train to Terminal 3, and finding the American Airlines ticket desk. At the same time, Nick tried to call Chase Travel to see if they could help. Most news articles highlighting these types of situations recommend calling the credit card agency first, but they typically take a long time to enact changes as they are basically middle men that call the airline and have to wait on hold too.

We got to Terminal 3, and AA told us that they could not help- Chase would have to call and re-settle the ticket from Monday to Sunday. Additionally, they couldn't even see our seats on today's (Sunday) flight, so they couldn't help much. At around the same time, Chase got back to us and said they were still on hold with AA. So we took the train back to Terminal 5 in desperation to see help from British Airways (BA).

30 minutes after leaving Terminal 5, we returned. To recap: BA said AA would need to reissue the ticket, AA said Chase would need to fix it, and Chase said AA wouldn't pick up the phone, but could see that we did "book" the Sunday flight. Nick had been on the phone for an hour and a half at this point, and Lauren dutifully carried the heavier, bigger bags through our plight.

In desperation, we went back to the BA check-in desks. We cut the line (the original agent said we could!) and talked to a new agent as our original one was off somewhere else. It was now 20 minutes until boarding.

The new agent quickly heard our story, understood the issue, and called ticketing again to try to figure out what the problem was. This time, ticketing said we had seats, we could change our tickets, but they only had premium economy level tickets on record (which is true) and we would have to pay to upgrade for the business class seats. So it was indeed too good to be true. We could've also kept our premium economy seats, but the flight was sold out of those, and also boarding was in 10 minutes so we would not make the flight anymore.

This combo of saints, the check-in agent and ticketing agent on the phone, found us seats on the 3PM flight on the same day, in premium economy, and overrode the AA/Chase/whatever roadblocks and got us tickets. He was determined to get us out of Heathrow after being stuck for almost 3 days. I think he also saw how tired and desperate we looked.

The tickets were very quickly revised, and we got boarding passes at about the time our original flight started boarding.

After going through security, we headed to the lounge to eat. Both of us, exhausted from stress and the terminal run-around, both took successive quick naps. Well deserved.

We boarded the plane after a slight (and now very scary) half hour delay.

The flight was nice, and we managed to sit next to each other after a kind person switched seats with Nick (which wasn't actually necessary as the adjacent seat was actually vacant).

Here's the Christmas-themed menu. The food was actually very tasty. Note: it was actually 1 meal at the beginning (dinner) and one meal right before we landed (light meal). The chicken and leak pie was v creamy.

The flight went rather quickly as we slept a lot, and took a more direct route from London to SFO through the Arctic Circle.

Finally, we made it to SFO, and quickly got our bags and went through customs. We got home at around 10 PM, immediately washed up, and fell asleep.

OKAY, so NOW we can say its over, 3 days overdue from when it was supposed to end. Now begins the endless laundry and unpacking.

This diary was fun to write, and largely a record for ourselves, but we hope you enjoyed reading it too. This was certainly an unforgettable honeymoon, and we're so happy with how many memories, good and "bad", it has supplied us for future reminiscing.

Merry Christmas everyone!!

(Here are some random facts about they honeymoon, if you want more content)