Welp, I'm back, but not without the requisite travel headaches one would expect from any long time away.
Yesterday I flew from Marrakech, Morocco to Amsterdam, where I was supposed to connect with my Sterling Airlines flight to Copenhagen. I had a fairly long layover, so I wasn't all that surprised when I couldn't find the desk that I was supposed to check in at. I figured I'd kill a few hours and then go back once my flight had opened.
After killing those hours, I went back to check, and sure enough, my 8:15 PM flight to Copenhagen was open for check-in, except at the SAS Airlines desk. Confused but unfazed, I slapped my well-traveled passport onto the desk and waited for the nice lady to give me my boarding pass. Instead, here is what transpired:
Lady: "Your name is Waters?"
Me, confused: "Yes..." (she's holding my passport, after all)
Lady: "We don't have you in our system, do you have a confirmation number?"
Me: "Not on me, but I can look it up downstairs on my email. I definitely confirmed the flight, 8:15 to Copenhagen. I booked with Sterling Airlines...I assumed that they were a subsidiary of SAS...no?"
Lady: "Sterling? I don't know a Sterling."
Lady at next desk: "Oooh...Sterling? They went bankrupt."
Me, incredulously: "When? In the past three weeks?"
Lady at next desk: "Yeah, five days ago."
Me: "Umm..."
God, or some other omniscent ruler of the universe: "HAHAHAHAHA."
One would have thought that in the airline's dying moments it could have summoned the strength to send out a short form email to all of its customers, something alone the lines of: "Oh, by the way, we're bankrupt now," but evidently they were too busy shredding documents and spray painting over their logo to get to a computer.
Anyhow, the next flight with seats available wasn't until 7:05 the next (this) morning, and after checking that a train wouldn't make more sense (it didn't), I booked for the tidy sum of 190 Euros. I planned to just kill time in the airport and go drink at the airport bar, but after a couple more minutes of sitting on the hard ground and lugging my baggage around, I decided that this was an awful idea.
Long story short, I had the good fortune to run into three of my DIS colleagues who were supposed to be on the same flight, and we checked ourselves into a budget hotel nearby. So at 9:00 this morning, I arrived back in Copenhagen, tired, a couple hundred Euros poorer, but happy to be back.
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