Airport Nightmare

I get nervous when flying. Oh, not the actual flying part, just the “getting to the airport in plenty of time to check the luggage and not miss the flight” kind of nervous.

I’ve flown so much you would think I could just take it in stride, but it’s days like yesterday (and the time we missed our flight coming back home after our honeymoon and had to overnight near the airport to take the next flight that left at some early hour like 6 a.m.) that give real rationale to my fears.

Our flight last night was to leave at 8 p.m. We left our friends’ house later than I thought we should, but I still figured we had plenty of time to make the flight. In fact, despite the horrendous traffic, we got to the airport a little more than two hours before our flight. This even includes a stop at a bank where we met Pam’s sister-in-law who made two dresses for me in a time span of only 30 or so hours. We picked up the dresses, and though I haven’t tried them on yet, she took every measurement imaginable, so I’m confident they’ll fit.

The Accra Airport is a mass of people. Well, first, it’s a mass of traffic as you approach the airport. Everyone coming to meet arriving travelers has to wait outside the airport building, and it looks as if every person arriving has approximately 14 people who come to the airport to greet them.

We make our way in, get in the queue for our airline, and quickly arrive at the first kiosk where the man asks for our tickets. We hand him our electronic tickets, complete with reservation numbers, and then the ridiculousness begins.
We guess there might be a problem when he scans his list of passengers, asks several times where we were going, and then makes a phone call on his mobile phone.

“There’s something wrong with the payment.”

Uh-huh. We paid for these tickets about 5 months ago, John called to verify we were on the flight just a few days ago, and John explains to the man that the money did actually go to the airlines based on our credit card bill and the money we then paid to the credit card company.

The man has no answers, just keeps repeating himself (a trend with Ethiopian Airlines, it seems), “There’s something wrong with the payment.” John, assessing the severity of the situation and the severe time constraints we were now under considering we apparently have no tickets to get on the plane, asks the man to direct him to who he needs to talk to.

As quickly as we can we make our way back outside, through a crowd of hundreds of people, pushing our luggage trolley piled high with bags, to a building next door. Turns out the Ethiopian Airlines office is upstairs. And there’s no elevator. So I wait with the bags and pray fervently for God to work a miracle and get us on our flight with our bags while John retreats upstairs.

Pam, meanwhile, is waiting for us to check in and then come back out to the nearby parking to say goodbye, but John calls her to briefly ask her to come meet me so that I am not standing outside alone. She leaves our luggage with her driver and we join John upstairs.

I might have found the right office without a sign on the door just by the sound of John’s raised voice. I have never, ever heard my husband yell. It sounds funny. But there he is, yelling at the airline guy. While a little embarrassed, I realize time is ticking away and I am angry, too, so I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes.

And here we have another lesson in negotiation in Africa; John’s college negotiation classes just don’t work on this continent.

The Ethiopian Airlines personnel in that office are not friendly Ghanaians. So, Pamela couldn’t even help us out.

There we were, with our names, our reservation numbers, and our payment right in their computer system! Why is there a problem? The guy tells us he has to see the credit card we used to buy the tickets. Unfortunately we do not have that card with us. For the first time in our lives, we discovered that a passport is not always verifiable I.D. (at least, not with Ethiopian Airlines).

The man is intent on getting us to pay for our tickets again on a different credit card. John feels certain this is all a scam seeing as their own system shows we’ve paid for the tickets. While yelling at the airlines representative, John is also frantically on the phone with our credit card company, and the Ethiopian Airlines representative continues to just repeat himself. He finally says the previous amount will be refunded, but when John asks how he will know that it is refunded or if there is a receipt or something, the man just stands there staring at him blankly. Then repeats himself again, “Your other payment will be refunded, just give me a new credit card so you can pay for your tickets.”

There was a lot of blank staring/repeating and yelling going on (by the Ethiopian Airlines representative and John, respectively). Come to think of it, John was repeating himself a quite a bit as well…a lot of words like “ridiculous” and “unbelievable” were flying around.

Pam made the guy promise that if we paid for the tickets (again!) the plane would wait for us and we could get our luggage checked seeing as it is now about half an hour until the plane takes off.

Even after waiting forever for the guy to type in our credit card payment into the computer and print out some papers, John argues that now we’re paying more than we paid the first time for the same seats.

The guy says, “This is a one-way ticket.”

Um. Yeah. What was it last time? Oh. A one-way ticket. This line of reasoning gets us nowhere because, you guessed it, the guy just keeps repeating that this is a one-way ticket.

Finally it is so late, about 25 minutes before the plane will take off, that John abruptly ends his conversation with the credit card company asking them to look into this fraud and make sure his money gets refunded, and we rush out the door.

Back through the sea of humanity, back into the airport, this time Pam ignores the guard and walks with us to the check-in counter. As soon as we walk through the airport doors an agent tells us to follow him, checks our luggage, and prints our boarding passes. Another agent then whisks us to the front of the security line where we get through in approximately one minute, then goes into the immigration office to persuade the officer there to please stamp our passports and let us go because the regular customs desks have queues. He reluctantly agrees, and get our passports stamped and deportation cards reviewed in another minute or so.

We run to the gate, hop on the bus that takes us to the plane and finally get sympathy from the airlines agent who meets us on the bus.

Sweating, shaking, and tired we plop down in our seats…the ones we have now paid for twice. That’s right - $1400 twice (a little more the second time). We never got any kind of confirmation from the airline that they’re refunding the first payment we made five months ago. Maybe the guy really will refund our money, but all evidence so far proves otherwise.

We’re still praying our luggage got on the plane. I don’t see how it could have, but God worked out the whole getting on the flight thing, so I imagine he can get us our luggage as well.

Once seated on the flight I realize I should have put my sweater (now up in the overhead bins) on to cover my bare shoulders since we are now amongst a plane full of Muslims. I lean over to share this thought with John, explaining that I am probably offending everyone on the plane. John’s reply, “We paid so much for these seats we should be able to run up and down the aisle naked if we want to.”

We didn’t. Run up and down the aisle naked. We didn’t really even enjoy the dinner they served, which cost us about $87 each I’m guessing. We did, however, get a couple hours of sleep.

(There is now an update on this refund situation posted here.)