Hawaii 2007 - Getting there

Well, what better place to start this story than the beginning – the planning… Annette and I submitted our request for a timeshare unit on the big island of Hawaii back in 2005. That was the easy part. The next step was to plan on how to get there. Because we were using our AirMiles for travel, we are limited to arrival in Oahu, which is the commercialized island noted for Honolulu, Waikiki, Pearl Harbour and Diamond Head. The island that Annette and I enjoy the most is the big island, also known as Hawaii. It is the largest of all the islands, and in fact is larger than all islands put together. It is much less commercialized, and has the most active volcanoes. It sports the largest mountain in the world, upon which some of the world’s most renowned observatories exist. It also has just about every climate within the 250+ miles circumference of the island, some of the best beaches in the world, and much more.

So, back to getting there… We planned for an overnight stay on Oahu, then catch an inter-island flight toward noon the next day. This time, we decided to indulge a bit and stay at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, which is one of the nicer hotels. And once on the big island of Hawaii, we planned to stay at a resort on the north-western side of the island that is nestled on a golf course.

We booked this all through reward programs. My advice to you is to plan very carefully. While our vacation was extremely cost effective for a Hawaii vacation, there are appreciable risks. The first being non-direct flights. I should have suspected that we would run into problems when AirMiles would only give us the following flight to the island:

• Toronto to Vancouver on WestJet

• Vancouver to Seattle, Washington on NorthWest

• Seattle to Oahu on NorthWest

• Then we had our Aloha inter-island flight to Hawaii.

The more connections you have, the higher the potential to miss flights, luggage, whatever… There’s your hint to where I’m heading on this blog…

Let’s get back to home base though. The picture basically captures what we were leaving behind. Basically… This was the storm that hit Ontario the day before we left, but a considerable amount melted before we actually hit the road. And the last few weeks were bone chilling cold (-20C). So we were both happy to leave this weather behind!!

So with luggage all packed and cameras ready to roll, we headed for the airport.

The employees at WestJet are great – very courteous and excellent customer focus. Nothing against WestJet, but our flight delayed by an hour in Toronto because there was a lack of baggage handlers at the Toronto airport due to “colds”. We had no idea at the time of the impact of this delay to our travel. We had planned for 2 hrs between flights, which was confirmed by reward travel agent as being sufficient. When we arrived at Vancouver, we were delayed another ½ hour for our luggage to arrive so that we could board the next flight. With the combined delay, we missed our connecting flight.

When we went to the NorthWest information center – there was no-one there!! Other than a sign indicating to head to the AlaskaAir desk for any inquiries. So we headed over to the AlaskaAir counter and waited in line for the next agent to become available. The best advice he could give was to call AirMiles or NorthWest. Annette asked about alternative flights, and the best he could provide was a flight to Honolulu the next evening for $5,000. Yup, didn’t put too many zeros… that was the price from Vancouver to Honolulu!

So, Annette called the toll-free number for NorthWest and was greeted with a message indicating that due to high call volume they were disconnecting her call. Obviously we weren’t the only ones with a problem then.. But before the call was disconnected it advised to try calling back later or use the internet! And how are you supposed to access their site through the Internet from the airport?! At this point, I thought I was going to spend the night, or my vacation in jail. I was so pissed I could just feel the anger build at the way we were being treated. Good thing Annette kept her cool…

Next step was to call AirMiles. Annette got an agent fairly quickly, which was a good thing. You can just imagine the scene… Annette is trying to have this conversation with the agent, but I was thinking it is taking too long and am pressuring in the background to talk to their supervisor because what I was hearing from her conversation was that the earliest flight they could give us was for Feb 26 – almost the end of our vacation. Annette’s giving me the “buzz off” face while she tries to deal with the agent. What the agent also advised was that she wasn’t able to do anything for us because we didn’t purchase the trip insurance. We were offered the insurance when we bought the tickets, but we didn’t consider missed flights. Our thinking was that if for some circumstance we couldn’t go to Hawaii, we would just loose the cost of the airfare, which was about $300. Fine… We didn’t consider getting stuck in an airport for days. The other aspect of missing a flight is that subsequent connecting flights are automatically cancelled as well. So I made a mad dash back to the AlaskaAir agent to ensure that none of our connecting flights would be cancelled.

The AirMiles agent did suggest that we immediately talk to WestJet who had a flight out to Honolulu that night. We hiked over to an agent, who was courteous and helpful. We got a flight for $500 leaving within 3 hours. That beats the $5,000 that the AlaskaAir agent wanted to charge us!! We’ll figure out who we will get to cover the other flight later – but someone will…

So, WestJet saved us. To shorten this long story, we made the flight and got to Honolulu. Chris, we should have been more diligent after reading your travel planning mishap!

We arrived in Honolulu just after midnight Hawaiian time, or about 5am eastern time. By the time we found a shuttle to get us to our hotel it was about 1:30am. We were pretty tired by that point, so were looking for a comfortable bed. We headed for the check-in counter to find out that AirMiles was supposed to issue some sort of certificate for us to present to the Sheraton. However, the guy at the Sheraton was great and dealt with the information that AirMiles did provide. Chalk up another one for AirMiles…