We’re, uh, still in Newark. Airlines suck in this country, they really do. Maybe they suck everywhere, but they suck a lot here. Continental screwed up our reservation… at some point, our confirmed reservation became unconfirmed on the 6:10. Since a ton of people seemed to be flying to or through Ohio today (which was snowed out), every flight is booked. There is a good possibility that we’ll be in the hotel or terminal for the next 2 days trying to continue our flight to Austin. The airline doesn’t care because they’re “not liable” for the weather. We can’t just say, well, just give us our money back for the remaining segments of our itinerary, we’ll just drive home. Or, we can leave… but we can’t get our money back. Even though, in this case, weather had NOTHING to do with the reason we’re stuck here in Newark. Either a bug in their reservations system screwed us over, an error by an agent somewhere along the line, or the original agent lied to us (this looks least likely based on the digging several agents did for us today).

Continental sucks. Their gate agents, especially Cody (a tall, black man who is a red coat customer service agent) and this other guy, suck too. The only exceptions were the two nice ladies at the end who found us a 2 stopover itinerary they could confirm for tomorrow afternoon and the lady on the phone who dug through the history on our reservation(s) to help determine what happened.

For future reference, if you have a reservation snafu, the data moves out of the main online reservation system one week after the itinerary is completed by the traveller. Something to know in case you ever run into this problem.

Continental’s screw ups today are getting pretty interesting. A family from Holland on their way to San Jose, Costa Rica somehow got either their luggage or themselves (a family of four) to San Jose, California. A woman I met in the airport was on her second night in the airport hotel. Another guy was having trouble getting to Boston from Newark (it’s only raining up there, dammit!). A German couple had their flight disappear off the board with no announcement that the flight was cancelled, leaving them at the gate wondering what happened. The customer service line moved 10 feet in an hour and a half while we were in it. Our hold times calling in were over 40 minutes generally.

Agents are unhelpful about money issues, btw. We’ll be complaining next week to Continental for screwing us over and making us miss all the family traditions Heidi’s family has on Christmas Eve (our psycho itinerary gets us into Austin at 11 PM).

Hope you guys are having a better holiday.