Beware parking and Frontier

Hi guys! We’re back from vacation, and although I long achingly to be back in the Maui sun, it is nice to be done traveling. And it was funny – when we got home last night and walked in the house, it looked surprisingly bigger than I remembered. Odd, since we were only gone 10 days and our house is tiny.

I will have plenty of vaca recap posts complete with picture after picture after picture, but I need to get them all organized first. That in itself will take a few minutes, but I promise they will come.

First, though, I wanted to warn you about 2 things we encountered during this trip. One night last week we parked in a public lot during a dinner out in Lahaina, a little beach town on Maui, and our credit card number was ripped off by the outfit running the lot’s pay box. It was one of those lots where you park in a numbered space, then pay at the unmanned box/kiosk based on your space number. Well, instead of being charged the $5 for the night of parking, they tried to charge over $620 on our card online from Barcelona last weekend. Um, yeah right.

Fortunately our credit card company called to alert me to some possible fraudulent charges, and I promptly told them that no, that was not us trying to make those charges. What the f?! Thanks a lot, Tick Tock Ticket, or Tik Tok Ticket, however it was spelled. I couldn’t believe it. The other car in our party paid with cash for the parking, so we were the only lucky ones to get scammed. Jerks. Lesson? Pay with cash for little things, especially when you’re not dealing with an actual person for payment.

Second, Frontier Airlines officially lost my business yesterday. We had a 10:35 flight home from Denver to Milwaukee yesterday morning and were at the airport easily by 9. Plenty of time to check in and make our flight, right? Wrong! The check in line was wrapped all the way through the maze of guides and out into the middle of the ticketing area of the airport, and since D was traveling as a lap infant we weren’t able to check in online ahead of time to bypass the line. Well crap. We figured we’d have no issue, though, seeing as we were plenty early and things seemed to be moving fairly quickly.

However, when we finally made it up to the counter and tried to check our 3 small bags as we had on every other leg of this journey, the snotty Frontier agent refused to allow us to check in for our flight, saying we were within the 45 minute barrier when they close the flight. Um, what?!? You idiots made us wait in line for over an hour, with not one agent walking through notifying people that it was getting close to the cut-off time to check in for the earlier flights, like every other airline I’ve ever flown on does. You know what I’m talking about – the agent going through everyone in line asking if anyone’s on the next closest flight, and getting them up to the front to get checked in to make sure they’re on it. Apparently Frontier doesn’t believe in that system and would rather fly their planes half-empty instead.

So not only did she not allow us to check in for our morning flight, she wouldn’t even check availability on other airlines with similar or even close departure times. She dismissed that request with a quick, “No, there’s nothing else available.” Uh, I’m sure there is, but thanks anyway for taking those 4 extra seconds to check (turns out there were 2 other flights on different airlines with departure times close to ours). Nor would she take the time to see what our options were the following morning. Again, “No, nothing,” with an obvious lack of actually pulling anything up on her computer. So we were placed on standby for the 3:08 flight yesterday afternoon, with the chance of being continually rolled over on standby until the first available confirmed seats on the 8:51pm flight on January 4. What?! No.

Not only did we not want to spend 2 more days in Denver, but the Rose Bowl in which the Badgers were playing was on yesterday afternoon at 4pm CST! If we had to miss that because of Frontier’s beyond terrible ticketing agent, I was ready to throat punch someone. Ok, so we’re on standby, now what to do with our bags? One of Frontier’s saving graces has always been their policy of not charging you the extra $20 to check carry-on sized bags. Yeah, well, this girl obviously didn’t abide by that policy. She was going to charge us $60 for our 3 bags instead of the $20 we’d been charged by Frontier on our first flight to begin this vacation, since 2 of the suitcases were easily carry-on sized. Whatever. So we only checked 1 and the car seat through for free.

This is already making me mad again just thinking about, so I’ll try to make this long story short. After our disastrous encounter with the girl at the ticketing counter, we had to go through security 3 times since we forgot about things in our bags that were larger than the TSA approved sizes for liquids and gels. As we’d checked everything through the whole time up until that point, we hadn’t had to worry about that. Awesome. 1 time they made R pay to check his bag, but when I went back the 3rd time to check D’s, the woman was much more understanding and did not charge me to check the carry on. Um, how about some consistency, Frontier?

Thank god we were 2 of the 3 people who made it on that 3:08 flight on standby (D doesn’t count for a seat since she was a lap infant), and we made it home around 6:30 last night. Only 5 hours later than originally planned. At least Frontier does have the in-flight TVs so we could watch most of the Rose Bowl on the plane. We missed the very end on the drive home but tuned in on the radio, just in time to hear us lose. Ugh. Oh well, at least we were miserable at home instead of still stuck in Colorado.

So there you have it – beware of shady little unmanned parking boxes and Frontier Airlines’ ridiculously terrible customer service. You’d better believe I am filing a complaint on their website. We at least deserve our $20 back for having to pay to check R’s carry on, something for which we have never been charged until yesterday morning. What made me most irate about the whole fiasco was the ticketing agent’s attitude – she kept huffing and puffing and putting her head down on the counter in exasperation at how long the line was. Huh? That’s not our fault. Just do your job and get us on our flight! She obviously failed.

1 highlight of being stuck in the Denver airport for 5 extra hours yesterday? D was an absolute dream of a traveler, even taking an almost 2 hour nap while we waited.