Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Travel Tuesday: How Cranky Concierge Can Get You to Your Wedding On Time

Words by Jennifer Stein

Words by Brett Snyder

Cranky Concierge has been growing quickly, and I’ve been keeping my readers over on The Cranky Flier up to date with some of the better success stories. When The Antibride herself saw one of my posts last week, she thought it would be worth retelling the story here to show how a service like Cranky Concierge can really help you get out of a jam. I’ve tweaked the story just a bit to make it more, um, destination wedding oriented.

Last week, a big winter storm rolled through the Midwest, and that meant flights were guaranteed to be disrupted. It’s tough to keep those runways clear when snow is coming down fast. I had a client, who we’ll call Tarzan, who was heading from Chicago to Dallas for his wedding to, uh, Jane. His plane was supposed to arrive at 747p that night, and he had plans to meet everyone at 9p for a late dinner to kick off the wedding weekend.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. He’s an idiot for scheduling a flight to arrive only an hour before he needed to be there, but remember, I’m making up the background on this story (it was actually a business trip).

Tarzan was scheduled to fly on Delta from Chicago/Midway via Minneapolis to get to Dallas. Both Chicago and Minneapolis were seeing heavy snows, so Tarzan was getting nervous. He was supposed to leave Chicago at 245p, but when we looked, an earlier flight has already been canceled and the next one was delayed. He decided to head to the airport early to see if he could get out of town.

While he was on his way, we did a search here at Cranky Concierge to see what other flight options he might have. Sure enough, while Atlanta had weather problems the day before, it was clear now. There was an airplane on its way to Midway that was going to leave on time at 1225p. We figured if we could get him out of the snow on time, the rest would be easy.

He went up to the counter and they gladly put him on that flight, as they’ll often do when the weather goes south. They also put him on a connection that would arrive Dallas at 718p, still a half an hour before he was supposed to arrive. There was an earlier connection they didn’t put him on, but we figured we could fix that once he got to Atlanta.

Tarzan flies a fair bit and is actually an elite member in Delta’s frequent flier program. He was pleasantly surprised to see his airplane not only leave on time (3 minutes early, actually), but they even had a nice cushy First Class seat for him. Even though they needed to de-ice the plane, he still arrived just a couple minutes late.

Once he landed, I had an email in his inbox telling him where that earlier connecting flight was leaving from. I told Tarzan to swing his way over there to see if they’d let him onboard. Sure enough, they did, and once again, a First Class seat had his name on it. Our hero ended up arriving Dallas at 621p, and he was able to surprise Jane with a few quiet moments before the wedding insanity began.

Oh, and Tarzan’s original flight? It was canceled. My guess is that they would have put him on the 2+ hour delayed earlier flight if there were available seats. That would have had him arrive in Minneapolis just after the scheduled departure his connection, but that was delayed as well. He would have clocked in just shy of 9p in Dallas, and he would have been very late to dinner. Jane no happy.

Of course, much of this was possible because it was a relatively light day to travel. There were seats available on all these flights, and that won’t always be the case. You should always leave some extra buffer time when you fly to your wedding, and if you’re traveling during a busy season, you should leave even more.

For more info on Cranky Concierge, go to crankyconcierge.com, send us a note at info@crankyconcierge.com, or call us at (707) 797-7474.