In a previous Planning Update, I had explained how we had revised our original flights to China so that we would not be taking the assigned Viking flights through Doha, Qatar in the Middle East that were over 32 hours long each, both going to and returning from China. It was just silly for us to first fly west to Dallas, and then from there, fly back eastward toward the Middle East on the Qatar Airlines route to China, it was the long way around to get there…..most flights from the USA to China go the shorter westward direction, and are around 8 hours shorter in overall duration.
The only revised flights we could get through the Viking Air program had us ending up in Asheville, NC, not at our home airport in South Carolina. Since that flight was routed through Atlanta from Seoul, South Korea, we had consciously made the decision that we were just going to skip that last flight segment to Asheville after getting our luggage in Customs in Atlanta, and just drive home in a rental car from Atlanta. It was only feasible because of the requirement to claim our luggage to proceed through Customs in Atlanta. Otherwise, our bags would have normally been checked all the way through to Asheville, and we would not be able to retrieve them to skip the last flight segment to Asheville. It was our only option at the time, no flights home were available through Viking’s contracted fares, believe me, we tried.
Since making that initial flight change, I have been logging in to MyVikingJourney multiple times every day and checking to see if we could change our flights and fly home to South Carolina instead of going to Asheville, North Carolina, or in our case, skipping the Asheville flight and driving home from Atlanta. I had never even gotten a single available choice when I used our home airport as our final destination, it had ALWAYS said, “No flights available to that destination”. I had also been checking for flights ending in either Charlotte or Atlanta, and occasionally I was able to see flights to Charlotte, some also routing through Atlanta like our Asheville flights, but they always ended up being “No Longer Available” after I selected seats and hit the final selection button for those flights. I was never able to get any flights ending up in Atlanta. Our premise for Charlotte was that it was closer to home, and if need be for some airline regulations, we ended up not skipping out in Atlanta, we would be closer to home in Charlotte than Asheville, it is only 100 miles to drive. This surely seems like a complicated mess, and it was.
Long story short, today, as was my usual procedure for checking on updating our flights through the Viking website, I selected our airport as the final destination airport and was shocked to see that there were actually two different flights to select from, both listed as no cost increase. Wow, that had never happened over the last 30-45 days I had been checking, I was shocked. Surely, they were more of the “phantom flights” the Viking system always gave me and they would not actually be available at the end of the selection process. I played along as I have been doing, I went through the seat selection process and then waited for the usual message, “Those flights are no longer available” to appear.
But, that terrible message never came. It actually showed the flights and seats I had selected as being available, and there was no additional fee. Now it was decision time before I hit the final confirmation for the change. The only issue with the new flights was that we had different departure flights, we now would be leaving on Thursday night, September 19 instead of early on Friday morning, September 20. However, we would now be arriving in China on the morning of September 21 at 9:40 AM instead of 8:05 PM that same night on our original outbound flights. It was probably better, nothing like being in a foreign country and having to get a taxi to a hotel late at night after really long flights.
Stephanie was sleeping in this Sunday morning, so I had to quickly wake her up for her input on the new flights. We both thought it was better to leave Thursday evening and arrive in the morning in Bejing. The return flights were exactly the same as we already had, but now the last flight segment was ending up in South Carolina, not Asheville, NC. We would also avoid skipping out on the last flight segment to drive over three hours home from Atlanta after long flights.
We both agreed to make the changes and I proceeded with confirming the flights. It took about three minutes for me to get the verification from Viking that our flights had been changed. The only other issue we had was that we couldn’t select seats on the initial segment of the flight home from Beijing to Seoul, S. Korea. I would just have to try and log into my Korean Air account later and try to select them there. I had gotten that account for our original flights, which were also a combination of Delta and Korean Air.
Everything was set with the new flights and I received a new itinerary document from Viking showing us leaving on September 19. I had hoped it would be a new Viking Flight Itinerary document, just for verification, but maybe that will come later. It is still hard to believe the change finally went through and there was no additional cost.
Just for the sake of checking, I did go onto the MyVikingJourney website again try and revise these new flights to see if we could arrive on September 22, which would put us leaving on Friday, September 20, our original date to leave on this trip. Flights appeared, but leaving on the next day increased the cost by about $550 per person, not worth the additional cost, another night at our hotel in Beijing would be less expensive. I never tried to make the reservation to see if the flights were “real” and not “phantom listings”, we were not interested in the additional cost option so I did not proceed.
Next, I logged into my Delta account and the new flights were already listed. I tried to make seat selections for that one segment on the return flight through Delta, but it would not work there either, no seating chart was available, so I was out of luck. I think since it was an originating flight on Korean Air, even Delta could not access the seating chart for that particular flight, the same situation Viking Air.
Next, I logged on to my Korean Air account, and the new reservation was also listed there, but I still could not select seats on that one flight originating in Beijing for our return home. I received a message indicating that the flight had to be purchased before seat selections could be made. We will let the dust settle and make sure we are happy with the flights and then ask Viking to go ahead and ticket us so we can select our seats for that first flight segment home. However, once ticketed, changes will be harder to make, so we need to make sure we are completely happy with these flights.
I was thrilled that something good had happened after all the effort I had made to check on flights once or twice every day over the past month or longer. I was about to give up and just accept that we were driving home from Atlanta. I knew it was not going to be long before those original flights would be ticketed anyway, and after that, changes would incur a fee. But, it just shows that making an effort and being persistent does sometimes pay off, especially in the ever-changing airline ticketing arena.
On another subject, this week we will be able to log in on the MyVikingJourney website and make our selections for shore excursions for the cruise portion of the trip. We will be spending the next couple of days reviewing the available excursions for each port and making our selections for both the excursion and for the excursion departure time for the ones we choose to go on.
We can already see that most of the “free” included excursions look like drive-by bus rides, and while these are always listed as one of the Viking cruises’ “perks”. However, we have found many of them to be a waste of time on some of our past Viking Cruises. But, there may be one or two we decide to do if time is available after we go on a better, paid excursion.
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