Saturday morning, I was off to SFO to begin another trip to Milwaukee. SFO was a mess to start off the Memorial Day weekend, as lines everywhere were backed up. Even the 1K/First Class check-in line was overflowing past the roped area, and the priority security line was pretty long. It probably took a good 15-20 minutes to get through it.
1K/First Class Check-in Line at SFO
My flight to ORD was on a 757-200, and I had upgraded using a soon-to-expire Regional Upgrade and chosen my favorite seat, 1B long in advance. When priority boarding began, I worked my way past all the people crowding the boarding area waiting for their row number to be called to the priority boarding lane and handed the gate agent my boarding pass. As she scanned it in the machine, it beeped in error, and she said, “Passenger already boarded. Hmm… just get on.” I finally got to the front of the plane to my seat, and there was already a passenger seated there. I asked if he was in 1B, showing him my 1B boarding pass, and he flashed his 1B boarding pass as well. As we took a closer look, he noticed that the 1B boarding pass had my name on it. He was traveling as a family of four with his wife and two kids, and they had been given 1A/1B, and 6A/6B. Their last name was the first two letters of my last name, so apparently the check-in agent had checked them in and saw me in 1B seated next to 1A, and made the mistake that I was the fourth member of their party.
I brought this to the attention of the purser, and he asked me to hang out in the aisle while he asked the gate to get it sorted out. After about five minutes, one of the ground crew came on-board to see our boarding passes again and to ask a few questions. He asked me where I was supposed to be seated, assuming that I had been inadvertently given 1B and it had been double booked, to which I replied that I had had 1B booked for over four weeks. He left the plane again before I can say anything else to try to explain what had happened, and it took another 10 or so minutes before he came back with the proper boarding passes for the family of four, showing one of the seats as 2A. Since the four were already split into pairs, one child per parent, I volunteered to take 2A without complaining. While I do prefer both aisles and the bulkhead, at least I was still in first class so I was happy to do the switch. I was, however, shocked that 1) the check-in agent would give them the boarding pass of another passenger (namely me), 2) they got through security with the wrong boarding pass for one of the passengers, and 3) they made it onto the plane, all without anyone ever noticing the error. Now, I don’t feel particularly unsafe because of this, but it goes to show what a joke airport security is.
The adventure continued on-board: as we were pulling out of the gate, we suddenly jerked to a stop. At first, I thought that maybe we had backed into another plane and thought that we would be stranded for awhile as they would need to rebook us onto later flights. But after we sat there for a good 10 or so minutes, we continued our taxi toward the runway. As we were going forward, I saw an Airbus behind us, and it appeared to be undamaged, and at any rate, it was too far to have been in a collision with us. I guessed that we had braked hard to avoid a collision, and the captain later confirmed this, announcing that the tow cart had slammed on the brakes, which is what caused us to violently stop.
San Francisco Bay
Once we were going, the purser came around for drink service and apologized for the seating mishap. He apologized again when I got up to go to the restroom later, which I thought was nice, although unnecessary since it didn’t really bother me. The flight arrived about 40 minutes early, so I was able to make it to the United Express gates in the F terminal about two and a half hours before my connecting flight to MKE. I noticed that there was another flight leaving soon, but there was no one at the gate so I walked over to the next gate and asked them to put me on standby for the earlier flight. The woman told me that it would be $75, then I told her that I was Premier Executive. She said that free standby was for 1K/Global Services only, but I replied that I thought there was a recent policy change that made it free for Premier Executives. She looked it up, and I was, of course correct, as both United and Continental had sent out e-mails announcing this change a couple of weeks ago. I easily cleared standby on the flight as it was about half-empty, and although the flight went out about half an hour late, I still arrived in Milwaukee over an hour earlier than scheduled. To add to the list of small things that happened that shouldn’t have happened, the gate agent started boarding us before the crew on-board were ready, and since the gate doesn’t use a jet-bridge for CRJ-200s, we were left standing out in the rain while the crew finished cleaning and preparing the cabin for boarding. Again, not a big deal, but it definitely added to the interesting day that I had.
Milwaukee
At MKE, I called the Holiday Inn Milwaukee Airport for a pickup, and they told me to use the Go Airport Connection shuttle connection. Apparently their own shuttle is out of service, so they were sending people over to the shuttle service and paying for the shuttle. Although I am on Pointbreak nights, they gave me most of the Platinum benefits minus the room upgrade, which were outlined in a letter they gave me at check-in: free breakfast, a discount at the restaurant, and some drink coupons.
Overall, it was a very unusual travel experience with many small mishaps along the way.
Holiday Inn Milwaukee Airport
