Cliffs at bottom.

Had a flight to Mexico for 6:30am this morning. Yesterday my GF realizes she can't find her passport (tillllllt). We go to the passport office with all her other docs and the guy tells her no problem they can get one made before they close. She is then passed over to some grumpy old lady who later tells her they won't get it done until 11am Friday morning.

So I go to US airways website to change our flights. Website is down, sick. (Also they apparently don't have an app??) So I call US Airways to change our flights, the guy tells me there are no flights after 11am until Saturday and there will be a ~$200 fare difference in addition to the $150 change fee per ticket. ****.

So I hang up and try to decide what to do. GF calls back and talks to some lady who tells her there will be no fare difference, just the $150 change fee per ticket. Obv seems like a far better option but we decide to keep looking for her passport for a bit b4 calling back again.

The next time we call back we talk to a guy who also says it will just be the $150 change fee, but then discloses "off the record" that what we should really do is just go to the airport at 6am as if we are trying to board our original flight and explain the passport situation at the airport and they will waive the change fee for us and schedule us on the saturday flight for free. We ask him how much availability there is on the Saturday flight because we obv don't want it to sell out b4 we get to the airport and he says it will definitely not be a problem as there are many flights from Phoenix (our connecting city) to Puerta Vallarta on Saturday and they all have space. So we decide to take his advice and hang up again.


A little later my GF starts getting nervous about that plan and calls them back again to see if anyone else will confirm that this is a good idea. The chick she talks to says it's not a good idea and that they will 100% charge us the $150 change fee even if we go to the airport.

So we mull this over a bit and decide to call back and just pay the change fee to guarantee spots on a Saturday flight. This time the person we talk to says not only do we have to pay the change fee but also a fare difference in addition to a $35 booking over the phone fee. (the whole reason we are calling rather than doing this online is bc their website is down!)

So she tilt hangs up and that bitch and calls back and asks to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor says she can waive the fare difference so it will just be the $150 change fee, but tells us there is only 1 flight available, leaving SD at 6:30am and then having a long layover in PHX before arriving in PVR at like 5pm. This is totally contrary to what the earlier people had told us, especially the guy who recommended waiting and just going to the airport.

So we hang up on that chick and call back, we talk to a non-supervisor who finds us a much better flight (leaving SD at 6:30 but getting into PVR at like 1:30pm) but she says she can't waive the fare difference. So we have her connect us to a (different) supervisor who says she can waive the fare difference and put us on the desired flight for just the $150 change fee. So we accept this and she books it and then goes on to tell us there are no seats next to each other on the SD-PHX leg or the PHX-PVR leg (not surprising since it's pretty last minute). So we ask for a refund for the "choice seating" that we paid for in order to get seats next to each other when we initially booked. She says choice seating is completely non-refundable. GF argues a bit but she doesn't budge. We finally hang up, feeling OK about only missing 1 day of the trip and being out the extra $300.

Today I get an obviously automated email informing me of a refund for the "choice seats" that we were unable to use. WTFF???

Cliffs:

US Airways website was down so GF and I got to call in and experience some real customer service.

Got told a completely different story by each of the more than half a dozen employees we talked to.

Highlight was probably the employee who wanted to charge us a fee for booking over the phone as if we would ever in a million years be calling and talking to these idiots if their website was working. And then the supervisor who insisted that it was impossible to refund "choice seat purchases" apparently completely unaware that the system would automatically refund them once we didn't board our flight.

Cannot wait for these ****ing dinosaur airlines to go extinct.