Sam and I flew with stand-by/buddy passes to NYC (JFK airport) via JetBlue Airlines. We debated prior to finalizing our plans whether or not to purchase full-price tickets home, but, we decided to gamble with the cheaper stand-by tickets and hope for the best. The flight numbers from last year showed that there were many open seats on the flights Christmas Eve and Christmas Night.
After all of our marvelous experiences in NYC (which I'm sure you've all drooled over, right?), we headed to the airport on Christmas Eve early-afternoon to check-in.
The check-in lady told us our luggage would be sent to SLC even if we didn't get on the flight. Oh. That was new to us. Oh well. I did have my toothbrush in my carry-on.
4 hours later, we were shafted, due to many other stand-byers and last-minute ticket-purchasers. We re-booked our stand-by tickets for the Christmas evening flight and were told that we shouldn't have a problem catching that flight home--there were enough seats for us with stand-by tickets.
After deliberating, we decided to just stay the night at the airport. The only thing waiting for us at our friend's apartment was a bed--we'd have to hope there was a place open to buy food Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and pay more for transportation to get there and back. So, we staked out the terminal and found a place to sleep for the evening.
(Oh the consequences of frugality!)The next day, we did some reading, some eating, some perusing of the terminal. We observed some little birdies who had decided to make the terminal their home, too. We watched one of the all-time best Christmas movies, A Christmas Story, which made it really seem like Christmas.
Then, we checked in again.Bad news: the flight was now full (what's up with all the last-minute ticket purchasers??), with 14+ stand-byers. Ugh. So, we decided to check out other options. My mom was vigorously searching kayak.com for cheapest flights out of JFK through other airlines, Sam was talking to his brother who works for JetBlue searching other options.
We learned that 2 hours before we checked in, we missed a flight that flew to Vegas and then onto SLC--it had 2 open seats. That news disappointed us. Too bad we weren't more proactive on ways to get home earlier.
Finally, we decided the best option was to catch the next flight to Denver using our buddy-passes. My mom ordered tickets for us online through Southwest from Denver to SLC. We arrived in Denver Christmas Night, around 11:45pm.
Again, we found a little isolated place to sleep, slept for about 5 1/2 hours, then woke up, checked in our flight, and flew home to SLC, making it back the morning after Christmas.
We learned that the next time we fly standby (yes, we're surprised, too, to even think we're thinking about a next time after this experience), we will do two things: 1) pack a change of clothing & socks in our carry-on no matter what, and 2) continuously be searching for the soonest flight out, instead of assuming that there are no such things as last-minute-ticket-purchasers.PS for those of you wondering about our regret to not purchasing direct flights home, we actually ended up spending less buying the buddypasses AND the flights from Denver than we would have if we had purchased flights from JFK to SLC back in September. Not bad, eh?
PPS this didn't ruin our Christmas at all. We still had a great time together.
2 comments:
We spent the Sunday night after Thanksgiving at the Denver airport to save some money. We were both sick and then got even sicker and I think we've decided never to do it again. I ended up with a major sinus infection that Scott attributes to being sick, spending the night at the airport and then going to work once we got home the next day. Who knows, but I admire you for your bravery.
Wow...that is really crazy!
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