Confirmation...

On our last day in Delhi, we took it easy. With a flight at 2:20am on Monday (Sunday night), we had some time to kill. We lazed around the hotel, watched TV, went shopping for some last minute gifts, etc... We tried to go see a movie at around 6, but it was sold out so instead we enjoyed a lazy dinner and some shopping for books. When we exhausted all of our options, we went back to our hotel to wait for a cab to take us to the airport at 11pm....three hours early, plenty of time.

As we walked into the terminal with all of our bags and bewildered expressions, we see a departure screen with our flight number that says, "Now boarding" and a scheduled departure time of 12:10 am!! We hurried around the terminal looking for the Austrian Airlines desk to get some information, but were informed it had already shut down for the night. After exhaustive conversations with unhelpful Delhi airport security guards, we finally found a red-jacketed Austrian Air official. He basically laughed at us and told us to go home, there will be another flight the next night at 12:10. All flights apparently had been moved earlier due to fog issues. He was shocked we didn't know, "the change occured as of the 15th of December". "Didn't you find this out when you called to reconfirm your flight 3 days ago?", he asked as we stared at him with a look that said, "No shit we didn't call or we wouldn't be here now, would we?" Although all we said was, "No". To add insult to injury, he said that because we are on an award ticket, we may not be able to make any changes either. That got us into a bit of a panic...

We booked ourselves back into the Claridges hotel at about 12:30am. We were both feeling embarassed and sick at forgetting to reconfirm our flight. Neither of us even considered it. It made me feel a little better to look on the back of my United Airline ticket jacket and read "United Reservations do not need to be reconfirmed", but I guess we should have known better anyway. When we got into our room, we tried to contact United Airlines to find out our options. Of course the Delhi office was closed for the night and the US numbers are all toll-free, unless you are international and can't call a toll free number. First we called United in the UK. They told us that we are screwed and by missing our flight, we forfiet the remainder of our ticket since no changes can be made to a reward ticket once travel begins. Now that made us panic even more.

We immediately went to the internet desk at 1am and started pricing tickets to get us home, even considering that we may be stuck in Delhi for three weeks waiting for an open seat over the holidays, possibly missing out on the European leg of our adventure. We found a flight leaving early today for about $1300 one way each. Not bad we thought...

As a last ditch effort we found an international number for United in the states. After waiting on hold for about 20 minutes, I finally found someone to talk to. She said it was at the sole discretion of Austrian Airlines as to whether we could fly standby on the flight the next night. Nothing more United could do. But she did say that our next leg from London to Seattle "shouldn't" be affected by this.

After a couple of fitful hours of sleep we raced to the Austrian airlines office in New Delhi to plead our case. We both agreed that crying and begging were appropriate. After a brief exchange, a couple of tense conversations with people behind the desk where all we heard was a bunch of hindi and the words "No changes allowed", the woman smiled and said "I can confirm you on tonights flights for no charge" We must have said thank you fifty times...

A tense night, feelings of stupidity and embarassment, and two, long, very expensive international phone calls later.... Now we are waiting around for our 12:10 am flight to Vienna and then London. It's about 4:20pm here now, I think we'll leave soon for the airport...just to recomfirm....