Winter Flying Blues

On Saturday, Dec 2, I was about to leave for the airport (KRK) which was the starting point on my KRK-FRA-SIN-SYD journey, when a message from Lufthansa arrived saying the KRK-FRA was canceled. I looked up the Internet and all became clear - the MUC airport closure due to heavy snow started the system avalanche effect. MUC serves close to one thousand flights a day, so even a fraction of those redirected to FRA would ripple across the whole network of connections. Well, despite the global warming, winter happens.

But then I did not envision how the physical snow would ripple through the (supposedly modern) infrastructure of computers, apps, AI chat bots and bot-augmented call centers served by humans. In short: nothing worked and it was a super long chain reaction of failures.

Chat bots were restarting, losing context and taking several minutes to respond to user interactions, Web servers were unavailable, crashing over exhausted resources and call center wait times could be counted in hours.

I remember the MUC shutdown in 2010 when I spent 7 hours in line to the transfer desk. But at least I was rebooked on a flight which actually took off. Fast forward 13 years later and no such luck this time.

When the call center agent finally answered my call on Saturday afternoon (all the bots and apps gave up...), he offered to rebook me on Finnair KRK-HEL-SIN-SYD on the following day. Having no better option I agreed.

Then at 17:34 I received an email to urgently contact back the Lufthansa call center (which already closed at 17:00). This scared me initially but then I calmed down as automated emails confirming the rebooked KRK-HEL-SIN segments arrived. I was not able to check-in via the Finnair web site though, and their agent informed me via chat that "the flights have not yet been ticketed". 

On Sunday morning the rebooked Finnair flights disappeared completely from my reservation. As the Polish call center was closed, I called Lufthansa Australia (they work 24/7) and they told me "of course we could not rebook you on Finnair as we do not have an agreement with them". And the nearest option she could offer me was Wednesday, which meant I would land in Australia on Friday, missing most of the Bluetooth Member Summit meeting. I hung up.

Taking a look at flights.google.com I realized there was a KRK-DXB-SYD (single layover!) FlyDubai/Emirates flight departing in 2 hours, so betting on the Lufthansa promise to reimburse the ticket, I booked it and rushed to the airport. And I made it, arriving in Sydney on time.

Still on Saturday I requested an arrival date change from my hotel via Booking.com. They declined, which turned up to be a good thing, as with the new DXB connection, I would still arrive on the intended day (Monday), albeit in the evening. So I did not bother negotiating further with them.

Upon landing in Sydney on Monday I received another message from Booking.com, actually approving my date change request: "the hotel will be expecting you on Tuesday". Bummer.

On top of that all my return flights disappeared from the reservation. The reason was: I did not fly the outbound flights - the ones which were canceled and then rebooked, but not ticketed, due to the lack of inter-airline agreements, so canceled again...

Two more hours with the call center on Tuesday and they restored the return flights by inserting a fake LHR-SIN-SYD British Airways flight marked as "flown" (even though I never was in London and did not fly British Airways on that trip). That was probably to trick the system from automatically removing my return flights due to a no-show on the outbound ones. What a mess! I'm yet to see if I'll be able to check in for my return.

This whole story just shows all the supposed IT developments have been pointless. The systems are scaled to optimize everyday costs not a peak demand which happens when a serious event takes place. Computers are unable to do basic stuff on their own (such as proposing an alternative route) and all must be handled by human agents who make errors.