I realize this is old… I’ve had it queued up for quite a while now and finally figured I should post it. (Date was ~09/24/2005)
I’m very unhappy with Rita right now. As some of you are aware I was scheduled to attend ACL this weekend, but my flight to Austin was canceled. The fun part about this mess was that instead of just re-routing me via some other city, Continental decided to continually try to put me on flights into IAH (Houston). This made my day at work on Thursday super exciting as I religiously reloaded my itenerary to see if I was going to make it to Austin. Meanwhile, my grandparents called to inform me that they were under a mandatory evacuation order and that they would be in Austin for the weekend. This was followed by a call from my dad to re-assured me that, if I was in town and there was no power, that there were matches and candles in the house. Oh and I found out that upon hearing the news that Rita might hit Austin (hurricanes don’t hit Austin BTW), people started to go crazy. A friend of mine who works for Randalls in Austin said that people cleaned out all of their canned goods, all of their water, and that one guy even went so far as to buy ~40 bottles of Dasani that was ment fot the vending machines at $1.25 each. Ugh…
Anyways, the problem with my flight was that Houston was expected to get hit and therefore Continental canceled all flights into IAH. Of course you can’t fly Continental into a city in Texas without going through IAH, which meant I had near zero chance of getting to Austin. Despite this, I was rescheulded for a flight on Friday that was consequently canceled and then re-scheudled for a flight on Sunday even though my return flight was on Monday. I think the best thing I heard all day was “It looks like you have a short trip scheduled” from a rep in Colorado Springs that called to tell me my flight on Sunday had also been cancelled. I don’t understand why the whole hub system makes sense any more or why Continental couldn’t just rebook me on some other airline but whatever… Fortunately, Continental decided to do the right thing and refund my ticket without penalty.