As I wrote about the other day, I managed to get my wife and daughter First Class seats on Lufthansa from Washington to Frankfurt continuing on to Berlin from there for their trip to Europe. All was going well yesterday afternoon when they met up at the United Polaris Lounge at Dulles.

They headed over to the Lufthansa lounge prior to boarding. Unfortunately, their inbound plane was diverted to Philadelphia due to storms in the DC area. The good news was that it was due to refuel and finish the journey to Dulles with just a two hour delay for their flight.

Then the bad news hit. The flight from Dulles to Frankfurt was canceled. I told them to go to the Lufthansa ticket counter and reminded them that they could try and get on any Star Alliance flight to Europe that night whether it be United, Swiss, Austrian etc.

While they were waiting in line, I received a call from Germany on my cell phone. Apparently, I had listed my number as the contact for the ticket. A very nice rep said that she had already secured them seats on Swiss in First Class to Zurich with a connection to Berlin.

The new flight was delayed a bit but when they reached Zurich this morning, a Swiss rep was waiting with a golf cart to drive them to transit security and then to their gate. I think they literally got from the plane to the new gate, including transit security, in less than 20 minutes. Try to do that in JFK or LAX sometime.

They just landed in Berlin and now have the afternoon to enjoy there as their original connection didn’t arrive until several hours later. As for the original Dulles-Munich flight they were booked on before I made the switch to first class, that flight ended up being delayed over an hour and landed late in Munich. In the end, given the bad weather and all the cancellations, I think they came out of this quite well.

I’m now heading to Atlanta airport to start my YOLO solo trip. I’ll have a full trip report when I get back. I’m glad I was able to get them sorted out before I left.

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