Babymoon

Part One: The Journey

Dustin and I had this San Diego trip planned for a while. I wanted to take one last vacation together as a couple before the baby comes. We get free flights through Dustin’s work, he had won a free car rental at Christmas, we are able to get discounted hotel rates through Dustin’s uncle, and I had been diligently saving my tip money for awhile. I was so excited we could afford a vacation, and that we could do it with cash! Sounds perfect right? Well that all unraveled yesterday.

Our original plan was to catch a flight to San Diego at 5:30, pick up our car rental at the San Diego Airport, and drive to our hotel.

In order to fly for free, we have to fly stand-by. Which is always a little stressful. Dustin called me early that morning to let me know that our flight had completely filled up.

Argh!

On to Plan B.

I decided to call Thrifty (the car rental company) and try to transfer our reservation from San Diego to Phoenix. My reasoning was that driving would take just as long as waiting for the next flight that was at 9:00pm. I explained that this was for a free car rental that we had won, and that the reservation needed to be transferred, not canceled, because in order for the gift certificate to work it had to be booked 14 days in advance. She assured me that this is what she had done, and that we needed to present the gift certificate at the counter.

Dustin picked me up from home around 5:30 and we drove to Thrifty car rental. The workers there had never seen a gift certificate before. They had no idea how to redeem it. Finally they brought out their manager, he clicked some buttons, and said that we couldn’t redeem this certificate because the reservation wasn’t booked 14 days in advance. I told them that it was, and that the lady I had spoken with earlier had transferred the reservation and that she told me everything would be fine. He said that she had canceled the San Diego reservation, and made a new one in Phoenix. As a result of that, he could not give us our free car rental.

This is my all-time, number one pet peeve: People who are incompetent at their jobs.

First of all, if the reservation wasn’t able to be transferred- she should have let me know. If that was the case we were just going to wait for the 9:00pm flight. Everything would have been fine. I don’t know if she just messed up, or if she was just telling me what I wanted to hear. Secondly, the workers at Thrifty should have taken ownership of their error and tried to help us out. But they didn’t even try, not even a little bit. The manager just kept saying, “I can’t redeem this.”

So because of their mistake we couldn’t get our car rental. We couldn’t even take the 9:00 flight anymore because the lady had canceled (not transferred!) the San Diego reservation. Also, by this time it was after 6:00 and it was too late to cancel our hotel reservation without being charged.

We ended up driving our own car. Which is fine, but it was just very frustrating to have to do that when we were supposed to have a free flight, and a free car rental.

We arrived here in San Diego after midnight. We went to sleep and had a much better day today.