Someone Has Some Explaining to Do

Back in March of last year, D and I purchased our tickets to travel from Canada to Arizona (where we parked for 2 weeks) before flying on home to Australia by way of New Zealand. When we purchased our tickets, we originally wanted to fly Qantas because quite frankly, I have a huge aversion to flying on any other airline. In my opinion Qantas is the safest airline, and since it's my life we're discussing, nobody can convince me otherwise.

Well, at least up until the point of our ticket purchase last year, nobody could. But you see, then we met the travel agent Liv, who convinced me that Air New Zealand is just as safe (if not safer) than Qantas, and that I would be perfectly fine flying on that airline. Obviously she was correct in that, since here I am today, writing out a post.

I have just digressed, though. When we were speaking with Liv, we told her we wanted one-way tickets to fly to Australia, because we couldn't really forsee us coming back to Canada anytime soon. She convinced us that it would be ultimately cheaper to book roundtrip tickets (and in actual fact, it was) and while she couldn't make them open-ended, she could put them up to 12 months in advance for the return trip. Okay fine, we said. Let's do that. We thought there would be no problem, but as she was typing up things on her little computer, suddenly there was a problem. Now she can't do a return trip to Australia so far in advance with Air New Zealand (but she could have with Qantas). This means of course, that she can only put the return trip as far in advance as February of '06, but before that time, we should contact her directly (or if not being able to, contact anyone in any Flight Centre, regardless of where we are) to have the change made to our return date, resetting to May of '06. She also told us that this would be done free of charge because she was unable to set the return dates one year from the date of our travel. We would get one free date change, and thereafter it would cost us money.

No problem, we said. Actually it's better that we do it this way. We said. Essentially that gave us a lot of leeway in which to change our return flight and go back whenever we wanted, up until May of '06.

After chatting with some people yesterday, this is not so. We went up to the Brisbane Airport in order to talk with Air New Zealand about having our return flights changed and the tickets reprinted without having to wait for them to come in the mail. This is around the time we found out that we do not, infact, get a free flight change. Rather, our flight change is going to cost us US$150 each.

You can well imagine how royally pissed off we were. Are.

We were nice though. We did not scream at the nice lady from the Air New Zealand desk. We were not mean or rude to her. She sent an email to our travel agent, and is now awaiting response from her. (I should point out that I have sent several emails to our travel agent, Liv, and have not heard one word back from her)

From there we headed home, stopping at the nearby shopping Mall to go and tell our tale of woe, horror and misfortune to another person at Flight Centre. We were lucky enough to have the good fortune of dealing with the lovely Allie, who also sent off an email to Liv asking her to call us, or email us, or something, because we are her clients and we are NOT happy in the slightest. Allie then informs us, that basically Liv had told us a bunch of bullshit; that Air New Zealand typically does not offer free flight changes, BUT THAT QANTAS DOES! Qantas, the ORIGINAL airline I wanted to travel on, you'll remember. She also said, that unfortunately if Air New Zealand told us it was going to cost an additional US$150 to make the flight change, then that would be correct and we would have to pay it.

Obviously, we are not happy with this and we stupid enough not to get any of our original itinerary in writing regarding the free flight change. What the hell were we thinking?

Okay, so now that part is over with, while we are waiting to hear from either Liv or Allie, or the woman at Air New Zealand, I have this question: We bought the tickets in CANADA. Why then, does our flight change require the money to be in US FUNDS? WHY is it not in CANADIAN funds where we purchased them?

Oh and PS, I went for my Cholestasis test on Friday. I won't get the results back for another week yet, but fingers crossed I don't have it.