It was an expensive trip to (not) Oktoberfest... | Adventure Every Day

What could be better?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the purpose of this trip was less to get s%#tfaced at Oktoberfest and more so just to hang out with my aunt and uncle and their travel companions in Munich for a day or so.

I didn't really have much agenda about what I wanted to do there, other than the following:

1. Have at least one beer to report for @detlev's #BeerSaturday.

2. Learn more about my family's German heritage.

Both of these were a completed successfully, so I'm inclined to say the trip was a smashing success. Plus, we got to see some cool sights and buildings and have some drinks and food at the Hofbräuhaus, so all the better:

Over-engineering

One thing my family is known for, at least me and my dad (though I confirmed with my uncle that this is indeed a family-wide infliction), is coming up with insanely and unnecessarily complicated plans that involve way too many moving parts. On paper, these plans allow the most to be achieved most efficiently, and we're proud of ourselves for thinking so ingeniously.

Or so we think...

Problem is, one kink in the plan and the whole series of events is thrown off.

In this case, my return trip home on Sunday was supposed to look something like this:

Wake up 03:00, get taxi at 04:00, drop off aunt & uncle at train station 04:30, arrive at airport 05:00, fly to Berlin 06:15, leave airport to hang out with my friend for 3-4 hours in Berlin, come back for flight to Gothenburg, Sweden 14:10, walk around Gothenburg for 2 hours, get on bus to Oslo 17:45, arrive in Oslo central station 21:10 and then take the tram home.

Simple, right? And how clever - 4 cities and a friend visit in a single day! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, when the flight was inadvertently booked on an airline that officially became insolvent last month and announced that they will continue operations for only 3 months before shutting down, there's apparently a lot that can go wrong.

The airline: airberlin. And if you take anything away from this post, it should be this: Do NOT book a trip with this company under ANY circumstances, at least until they somehow fix their financial situation (unlikely) before closing for good.

If you see an airplane looking like this, do NOT book a ticket for it!

What happens when an insolvent airline announces that it still wants to operate for 3 months is that the employees of said airline begin jumping ship immediately to find new jobs, thereby leaving a SEVERE shortage of personnel left to operate the scheduled flights.

Translation: flights start getting cancelled en masse.

Which was the pleasant greeting I got when I arrived to the airport at 05:00. Fantastic. I don't stress about these things though, as I've gotten used to it pretty much being the norm for me.

That poor chap trying to make a connection home to New York though. Or the guy with the connection to Chicago. Or the girl from El Salvador who flew from there to somewhere in the U.S. to Zurich to Munich, went clubbing for a night, then was trying to get to Berlin to connect to Barcelona in time so that she could make her connection to Moscow with the group she was meeting. WTF!?!?! (Sounds like a plan I would think of!)

Those were the people I felt bad for. Especially when the next bit of news came, which was that airberlin doesn't even have customer service operating anymore, so we were told that we had to "go to Terminal 2 in the next building and buy a new ticket from Lufthansa, and then try and see if maybe you can get it reimbursed".

Hahahahaha! That's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Or at least I had to tell myself that, because the only other reaction to this absurdity would have been to explode in anger at the poor girl who had to tell us this (whose fault it is not that this company is a disaster), and it was far too early in the morning for that.

So we all trudged over to Lufthansa in Terminal 2 and tried to come up with something. The best they could offer me was €745 for a direct flight to Oslo, which I found online for a slightly more reasonable €469. I also learned that Merkel has already had to bail out airberlin to the tune of a €137M loan. So YOU are paying for this dumpster fire too!