NonRev Adventures to the Caribbean

Recently my parents faced a bit of a challenge trying to get to Santa Fe, New Mexico. You see, it can be a challenge to get to some of the less popular airports due to fewer flight options and one has to change planes somewhere and "Two-Leg It," as I say. Over the course of about 12 hours, I changed my parents' flights three times and had them going to a completely different airport in the end. Needless to say, this was a bit stressful for them. All the flights kept getting oversold at last minute when they had 40 seats open just the day before.

This same airline, which shall remain unnamed (let's just say it rhymes with schmamerican), caused Nicole and I issues just days later. The checkin process was archaic, requiring that we wait in line to speak to an agent who types furiously for a few minutes before issuing a paper ticket straight out of 1992. And despite entering Nicole's TSA-PreCheck number, she was put in the commoners line. Despite boarding a flight with more than 50 open seats, the gate agent issued us tickets that were rows apart from each other. And despite an online listing system that showed 12 seats available for our final leg, the company's own website wouldn't allow tickets to be purchased for said flight -- indicating that in fact that were no seats. In the nonrev world, 12 vs none is a pretty big difference. Why the discrepancy? So as we walked by a lineup of slot machines at McCarran International Airport, we figured that flying Schmamerican was too much of a gamble. How did we end up in Vegas? Well . . .

We were planning to go to Turks & Caicos in the Caribbean, which does not have direct flights. Our first, and most direct option, was to go from LA-Miami-Turks, but then the Miami flight was filling up rapidly because 20 people randomly decided they were going to go to Miami that day. There was a workaround that involved flying from LA-Las Vegas-Miami, so we tried that. Once in Las Vegas, all flights from Miami to Turks looked sketchy at best, so we went Las Vegas-Atlanta on Delta. Now bear in mind that we arrived in Atlanta around 5:45am and hadn't slept, so we wanted a place to rest. We each had some United club passes that we get from our credit card company, but we didn't have a United boarding pass. Ah, but wait! I listed us on a flight from Atlanta to Houston on United, scanned the pass at the desk and immediately canceled the booking once we had our foot in the door.




Now some might say that is cheating, but the boarding pass rule is bollocks as far as I'm concerned. Refueling with hot oatmeal and some Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, we prepared for our third leg, which would (hopefully) take us to Turks & Caicos, and into a tropical depression. Not like emotionally depressed, but the low pressure system kind.