It's not easy travelling to and from Latin America

(I promised a year ago in this blog post that I would write about this so despite the delay, I'm still a man of my word...)

What is it with me and trips to Latin America during Thanksgiving weekend?

In 2004, I went to Mexico for a week and a half to attend the wedding of my friends Amy and John (personal trip; thank God for frequent flyer miles!) which was on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The trip there was pretty decent, but the trip back to Manila was the worst. Well, my Brazil trip in 2005 also brought me to Latin America for the week of Thanksgiving. And fancy that, another bad flying experience. Ugh!

Trip to Mexico

My flight back to Manila was on a Monday, and I was supposed to arrive in Manila on a Wednesday evening. Itinerary: Cancun-Mexico City-Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur-Manila. The Mexico City-Manila portion was on KLM, but I was taking Mexicana for the the Cancun-Mexico City leg.

I had it all mapped out – I would get a massage on Monday morning to get me relaxed (Amy and John gave all their wedding guests a free massage voucher), take it a step further with a couple of Amaretto Sours, then have a huge lunch before leaving the hotel in time to get to the airport more than 2 hours before my flight. Cool right?

Unfortunately, this is how it went:

• I got to the Cancun airport and the line was unbelievably long
• I got to the ticket counter only to be told I was bumped off my flight because it was overbooked. So instead of leaving Mexico City around 4pm I would now be leaving at 530pm. I told them my connecting flight to Amsterdam was at 9pm and that if I arrived at the Mexico City airport at 730 I would be hard-pressed to make my connection. Didn’t get me squat.
• My 530pm flight was delayed 45 minutes. That meant I arrived at the Mexico City airport at 815.
• About 50% of the people on my flight had a connecting flight to Los Angeles so they got off-boarded onto some airport transport before everyone else.
• I get out of the plane at 840pm and without picking up my check-in luggage, I rush madly to the terminal where my connection was.
• I get there at 845pm and, despite all the pleading and begging, I’m told I cannot board the plane anymore.
• I go to the Mexicana counter and tell them my predicament. I am told to head to some other place four – I repeat, FOUR, times. Without any escort.
• I finally get to the right counter and am told that the earliest flight I can get is the same time the next day, which meant that I would lose one whole day.
• I ask them to help me get my luggage since I didn’t claim it. It took them more than an hour to help me out, and it required me to head back and forth from one place to another multiple times to get my bag.
• They tell me they would get me a hotel for the night that came with a dinner and a breakfast voucher. Of course, my flight the next day was at 9pm so I demanded a lunch voucher as well. At least they gave it to me.
• Then I ask them if I can use a phone to call home. They ask me to give me one number I should call. I have to keep from screaming, and in the calmest voice I can muster I tell them that they screw me over by over-booking and won’t even give me a call to the office and a call to my home. They still refuse to give me two calls.
• They tell me to go back the next day at 2pm. I tell them my flight is at 9pm so why should I be at the airport at 2pm? They say I have to be there at that time to sort out my flight to Manila.
• I finally get to the hotel, have some dinner, and then head to my crappy room (must’ve been a two-star hotel – lovely)
• The next day I head to the airport at 2pm only to find out that the KLM ticket counter only opens at 4pm.
• I then ask them if I can stay in the Mexicana business lounge. I’m told I can’t. So I am brought to this restaurant. I am told that I can order up to 100 Mexican Pesos worth of food on Mexicana but I can’t order any drinks. Which is great coz I just had a heavy lunch at the hotel and didn’t need more food, but I did need to drink at some point during that afternoon.
• I am then picked up at 4pm at the restaurant by someone from Mexicana and I’m told that now they CAN pay for the drinks I ordered. Wow, isn’t that great, they tell me that when I am about to leave? Too late the hero, ey?
• Then I have to wait 5 hours in the airport for my flight. Thank God I had a Worldperks Gold card that allowed me to get into the KLM business lounge.

Well, that's the last time I'm flying Mexicana. Boo them!

Trip to Brazil

Nothing’ll ever compare to that horror story. However, my trip to Brazil wasn’t the most pleasant either.

• Company trips, if longer than 4 hours, are supposed to be on business class. However, because I was booking flights a bit late, I couldn’t get a business class flight from Paris to Brazil. So that 12-hour leg of my flight to Brazil was on economy.
• Which isn’t all that bad really if it was a personal trip where I was gonna chill the moment I got to Brazil. But no, I was arriving in Sao Paulo at 730pm and I had to be in important meetings beginning 9am on Monday.
• The reason I couldn’t get a business class flight was because I was booking late. Which was because I was supposed to take two days off and fly to Brazil a couple of days earlier and swing by Rio. Unfortunately, work happened (again, ugh). And so my leaves disappeared. Which also meant bye-bye Rio.
• And because I wasn’t on business class from Paris to Sao Paulo, I couldn’t get into the business lounge. I tried my Worldperks gold card which does say on it that it gets me a free pass to any partner airline lounge, but it seems I didn’t read the fine print somewhere and it turns out that for Air France, you need to have a Worldperks Platinum card to get in. Tough.
• I also didn’t realize I would end up being exposed to the zero-degree November chills in France so I didn’t bring any jacket or sweater even. I figured I would just be inside the airport, but it turns out that I had to move from one terminal to another via a bus that wasn’t really heated. And we had to wait for the bus while standing outside. I’m pretty good dealing with cold actually, and at that time, I didn’t feel like I was freezing. But then the moment I got to Sao Paulo I realized that I was feeling sick already. So much for thinking I was Superman…
• When I got to Sao Paulo on Sunday night at 730pm, the line at immigration is incredibly long. So long in fact that it took an hour an a half for me to get my passport stamped.
• And then I find out that my luggage is missing. It turns out that it wasn’t picked up in Singapore because I flew Manila-Singapore on PAL and Singapore-Paris-Sao Paulo on Air France. This despite the fact that I was told specifically by PAL that my luggage would be checked all the way through to Sao Paulo.
• I didn’t get any updates as well from Air France on the location of my luggage so I was piss-in-my-pants worried my first two days there that my luggage would never get to me. Good thing that it finally arrived on Wednesday. Better thing as well is the fact that I am such a boy scout that I actually had my first day’s worth of clothes and enough underwear and socks to tide me over ‘til I finally got my suitcase.

So what’s worse than flying from Manila to Sao Paulo for 36 hours? Well, it is flying back in 41 hours. I had a 12 hour layover in Paris this time, but at least now I was fully on business class, so I spent the entire time in the lounge and even took a hot shower. However, I did spend about 6 of those 12 hours working on the presentation I had to give at 9am the day after I arrive. And what’s even nicer is that I actually arrived in Manila at 11pm and I get home past midnight. Factor in the unpacking and the settling I have to do and it’s not surprising that I fell asleep at around 3am. So after a 41 hour trip, I get to sleep 3 hours, drive through 2 hours of traffic, and give training to a big group of people.

On the bright side, this trip brought a lot of firsts with it – first time to go to Brazil, first time to travel to the Southern Hemisphere, first time for me to fly coach on a 12-hour long flight for a business trip, first time take a shower in the lounge, first time standing outside in zero-degree temperature without winter clothing.

So, two years in a row that I am in Latin America for Thanksgiving weekend. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s gonna happen this year but well at least I can say I won’t have another horrific plane ride.