Update: They fixed it. It seemed to happen tight after we got our Greek tour director involved. So we are pretty happy and excited again. I would highly recommend that you set up your own travel. That way you have the control and power to change things if you need to fix or change anything.
we are booked on an OAT adventure for Greece, Albania, North Macedonia. We set it up about nine months ago. Even splurged on business class the whole way from Oregon and back. We leave in a little over one week.
last week Turkish Airways canceled our Istanbul to Seattle flight. And substituted a flight from Istanbul to Seattle a day earlier. They also left our flight from Skopje to Istanbul, the first leg of the flight, on the original day. So not only would we lose one day of the tour, but it’s impossible to catch the flight to Seattle as we don’t get to Istanbul until the day after.
We had to bring this to the attention of OAT as neither they nor Turkish Airlines notified us of this change and that was last Wednesday. They looked for other alternatives, but none of them had the right layover time to switch luggage and go through US passport control.
This weekend we said, screw it, will miss the last day of the tour and just get a flight out of Skopje to match the flight out of Istanbul. In other words, take the same set up we had before they canceled the flight and just move it one day earlier. We were promised it might be solved last Friday, then we were told it would certainly be done by Monday, and now they’re saying it’s probably going to be Thursday.
What we discovered is that there are multiple layers and contracts in these air flight arrangements. The first person you call at OAT can help with simple things and if you get nowhere with them, you get elevated to their air operations team. They can do things that are a little bit more complex, but in our situation they had to elevated to the off-line air operations. A group of people that no one seems to be able to call and can only deal with via chats and emails. And that is not a privilege that we hold.
We called Turkish Airlines, because if I had made my own travel arrangements, it would take about 15 minutes for me to convince them to give me that flight on an earlier day or to pay for that flight. Turkish Airlines tells me that it’s all bound up with a contract with OAT and they have to make the changes.
The last person we talked to, we asked if we could talk to her boss. But it sounds like the boss does not have a phone number and she assured us that she is talking to her boss.
I have to say I’ve never been so stressed out before trip as I am with this trip. I think our fallback position will be to buy our own tickets from Skopje to Istanbul . The problem with us buying our own tickets is that it will be a separate ticket and we’ll have to get our luggage in Istanbul clear customs and recheck in for that flight to Seattle. We do have three hours, but it is a huge airport.
Does anybody have any other ideas on how to fix this? Or does anybody have any phone numbers or emails of higher level people at OAT that we can contact?