If you follow me on Instagram, you have probably already seen this story play out, but I wanted to share these Cabo photos on the blog, so I’m telling it again.
We had the most magical 5 days in the Cerritos/Todos Santos area of Baja. You can read my initial recap of that if you missed it. We dropped our friends at the airport before returning the rental car because they needed to get checked in and we planned to meet them inside for a farewell drink before heading our different directions.
Once we got to the Southwest gate, the nice woman told us that our flight was cancelled and then there was a long pause. We smiled at her and asked when we were rebooked. She told us that they had nothing for us.
I’m sorry, what?
I laughed and asked her again when we were rebooked and what we should do in the meantime. After a few more minutes of awkward silence, she is joined by three more representatives including a manager and they continue to stare at the computer and shake their heads.
They have nothing to offer us.
Our options are to call Southwest with the US cell phone we have that doesn’t have an international plan and see if they have any ideas or get a refund.
I had joked about extending our trip a few extra days, but when I had to text our friends and tell them we wouldn’t be meeting them in the terminal for a farewell drink, I was still in shock.
We decided to step away from the 4 nice people in front of us and game plan this ourselves. We got logged into the extremely slow airport free WiFi and started googling. Delta had some flights leaving Los Cabos that week that were still available, but it would cost us over $1800. United and American had nothing available for the whole week. Sun Country was the flight that we took down there and we knew they flew to the area on Wednesdays and Saturdays and they don’t come up in regular google searches, so we went to their website.
Much to our surprise, we found tickets available for their Wednesday afternoon flight for the exact same price we paid months ago. They DO NOT raise their prices last minute like every other airline. If we could get this flight, it would end up being $100 cheaper than the Southwest flight we booked AND it’s direct.
We headed back up to the Southwest desk and asked them to refund us all of our money. We asked if they had any hotel vouchers or assistance in finding a place to sleep, even though we already assumed that we would be on our own with that. We were right. No help on that front, but she did tell us that we would see the money back on our credit card in 22 hours… strange, but OK.
We attempted booking the Sun Country flights on the airport WiFi and could not get confirmation. The site kept timing out, so we got ourselves on hotels.com and found a place to stay in Cabo San Lucas. We had two more nights to pay for and thankfully places have deals on Mondays and Tuesdays. We found a resort that was 70% off and got a room and then paid the $80 taxi to the hotel. $80 freaking dollars. Should have just rented a car, but we were done with trying to make any reservations using the WiFi.
We arrived at our hotel to find welcome drinks and an extremely aggressive lobby full of timeshare sales people. It became a game to avoid them for the next 48 hours. We also discovered that we had actually successfully booked tickets on the Sun Country flight… twice. More money we would have to recover later.
We spent the next two days watching the temps in Minnesota plummet into the negative wind chills. We found out that Southwest had cancelled all flights to MSP, Chicago and Wisconsin for the remainder of the week leaving people we know stranded all over the country. We were grateful that we had no dogs or children that were waiting for us at home and our work was flexible about it as well.
We enjoyed the people watching, a sunset sail to see the famous arch, some great food and more warm weather. And we had no problems on Wednesday with our Sun Country flight. We even ended up with an entire row of empty seats so we could stretch out.
Since returning 10 days ago, I have successfully worked with Sun Country to get the second charge refunded. I also tried to work with Southwest over the phone and via email, but finally had to turn to Twitter. I hate doing that, but sadly, it’s the only way people respond now. I have gotten our refund (even though it took WAY MORE than the original 22 hour promise.)
I went back and forth with the customer service person and she told me that I did in fact get a notification that my flight was cancelled the day before (which DID NOT happen) and then she told me that they should have rebooked us on a different flight (which DID NOT happen). Needless to say, I wasn’t super happy to be told I was wrong, so I politely said I just wouldn’t be using them in the future.
And then they sent us a “goodwill gesture” of $50 off a future Southwest flight and said they can’t wait to share the skies with us in the future. We will see Southwest, we will see.
In the end, I’m grateful that we were able to navigate all of that with little to no stress. Not having people or animals dependent on us made that easier, I can’t even imagine how that would make me feel. We got to explore the city of Cabo San Lucas. We were able to keep the additional expense to a minimum thanks to some hotels.com reward nights and the cheaper airfare. And we successfully dodged those timeshare peeps the entire time.
The $80 cab ride is the only thing I’m still a little bitter about.
Have you ever been stranded somewhere? Do you hate using Twitter to get things accomplished? Tell me your stories so I know it’s not just me.
