Ticket misadventures

I started writing the draft to this story whilst at Changi Airport's Terminal Four on 11 Nov 2018. We had already spent two full days - and one evening - in Singapore, and my wife and I had now arrived at the airport at the almost unearthly hour of 6.15am on the 11th morning, waiting to catch our 10 o'clock flight. The frustration was that instead of taking a flight directly to Penang, we were flying to Kuala Lumpur and from there, we would change to the ETS train service to take us back to Bukit Mertajam.

So why weren't we flying straight from Singapore to Penang? We could even have flown at a later time and enjoyed more of Singapore. It was all my fault, really. Our original plan was to fly down to Johor Bahru on the 11th to visit some friends and relatives there before hopping over to Singapore on the 13th and then onward to Kuala Lumpur for a few days there.

That was the intention. It would entail flying from Singapore on the 15th morning so that we would arrive at the hotel  in Kuala Lumpur right smack after lunch time. Well, that was the plan. But no matter how well plans are, there is usually something that screws everything up. Mine was no different. When I was buying the flight tickets from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, somehow the date of travel was keyed in as 11 Nov 2018 instead of 15 Nov 2018. I didn't notice it until the transaction was well and completed, meaning paid up as well.

Then it dawned on me that I had made a mistake. A Big mistake. A mistake so big that it left me, for several minutes, wondering what to do. Could I amend the tickets? Can the date of travel? Certainly, the airline's website allowed that. For the customer to change the date of travel. So I tried to change the date of travel. Meticulously went through all the steps. Clicked all the changes required. Then it came to the payment page. I was prepared to pay a small fee for the change of travel date. But what was this I see? A penalty fee that was more than the cost of the tickets themselves. If I had agreed to paying, the tickets would have cost me more than twice what I paid for. What shit was that?? Effectively, the airline was telling you to burn the original tickets and buy new ones. No way could I agree to it.

No choice. We had to change our travel itinerary instead. Let's forego the Johor Bahru sector and go only to Singapore. This suggestion came from my wife. I was relieved. Going to Johor Bahru was her original proposal. So if she said to forget about Johor Bahru, I was more than agreeable to it. We'll just fly down to Changi on the eighth and then travel to Kuala Lumpur on the 11th.

There was one final piece of the jigsaw puzzle remaining. The return to Bukit Mertajam. I knew that there was an ETS train leaving Kuala Lumpur at 2.40pm. Unfortunately, all seats were sold out for the 11th. The only seats left were on the 8.40pm train. Thus, no choice but to buy the tickets for this train. The only snag was that the train would arrive at Bukit Mertajam at 12.45am. But after a whole day of misadventure booking flight tickets, all I wanted was to be able to come back to Bukit Mertajam on 11 Nov 2018, no matter how late it was going to be.