<p>S has been stranded twice. Once was when he was 16 and attending a summer program in Indiana. He got stranded coming home due to T-storms. The Southwest Airlines folks let him sleep in their back room for employees. I thought that was really nice of them.</p>
<p>The second time was when he came home for his first winter break as a freshman, coming home to Portland from Maryland. He got stuck in Phoenix for 2 days due to winter weather here at home (our airport closed). Fortunately we have relatives in Phoenix, and my niece rescued him and took him in. Since then, I have made it a point to always book him through Phoenix in the event of a delay.</p>
<p>Re: Connecting in towns with friends and relatives,</p>
<p>I never call friends or relatives if stranded. It’s usually late in the day when this occurs, they don’t live near the airport (could easily be >1hr away in larger cities), and the flight out next morning is usually early (like before 8 am, requiring arrival at the airport before 7 am). It’s much easier just to go to a hotel with a shuttle and not have to have them get up at 6 am next morning to bring me to the airport. There’s not much time to visit with them anyway.</p>
<p>If you use the vouchers that the airline gives you for a hotel, you have to use the process that is written on the voucher. It is often significantly cheaper to use them rather than go with even the best rate you can get without.</p>
<p>xposted with oregonianmom: I didn’t think about being stranded for more than a quick overnight which is the most I have ever had to deal with.</p>
<p>Sometimes when stranded you are not OFFERED hotel vouchers. And depending on the type of cancelation reason, there might not be a plentiful supply of hotel rooms. BUT we told our daughter…you wanna go to school 3000 miles away? Learn to deal with this yourself. The worst that will happen is you end up sleeping in an airport. She became a good advocate for herself. She was once on a flight that was delayed. She would have missed her connection and THEN missed a family wedding. She managed to get herself rerouted on a different earlier flight.</p>
<p>OH…another piece of advice…NEVER get to the airport at the last minute. If there is an issue like the one I described above, your kiddo will NOT have time to solve it if they arrive at the eleventh hour.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap, we often book my daughters’ trips starting at cities that are three-hour round trips from home, because it is usually is much cheaper and takes much less time than flying from the airport half an hour away. Wish it wasn’t so…</p>
<p>There are the free hotel vouchers that they give if the delay is their fault, then there are the reduced price vouchers that they give if it is not. Don’t know if you have to ask for the latter, but I have gotten them.</p>
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<p>Yes, but I make sure to use the hours I would have spent on CC to do stuff like drive extra distance rather than my working hours.</p>
<p>All this stuff would be familiar to most on the Music Majors forum.
Many musicians start traveling alone in teen yrs - air travel is customary. Auditions for conservatories or university schools of music usually require travel at very specified times (worst winter weather, specific date/time)
Believe me, it’s an added hassle with valuable instruments (or even heavy loads of sheet music!)</p>
<p>My comments are for those with two flights (oh, one flight is so simple - be grateful if your student has this situation!):</p>
<p>-printout of itinerary (so if you have to call airline, parents, whoever, you know what your details are); your frequent flier no. is listed right there, etc.
-I highly recommend getting frequent flier membership and collecting miles and status if you stick to one airline - we do and it has paid off numerous times in multiple ways
-cell phone and charger in hand
-a little bit of FOOD (like granola bars, etc.) – you can get stuck ON an airplane at/near gate or on tarmac during weather holds – if you have been in transit and not eaten, eventually you will greatly appreciate having a bit of food at hand
have a bit of cash
-yes, a credit card in hand
rip out the airport terminal map from airport magazine or print it off a computer earlier and fold and put in purse or pocket – (if you deal with any large airports) - this is very helpful if you have to run through O’Hare or other large airport, and don’t know every gate or your gate gets changed or you are late for your connection
I can’t imagine allowing 3 hours for a connection; after awhile that would get old.
-yes, travel earlier rather than later in the day</p>
<p>/‘Shrinkrap, we often book my daughters’ trips starting at cities that are three-hour round trips from home, because it is usually is much cheaper and takes much less time than flying from the airport half an hour away. Wish it wasn’t so"</p>
<p>megdog;fair enough. But on a busy weekday afternoon, that could cost me $400-$500.00, if I have four weeks notice. And cost her… boredom. For dad, or with shorter nice, just not an option.</p>
<p>“but I make sure to use the hours I would have spent on CC to do stuff like drive extra distance rather than my working hours.”</p>
<p>Ouch…tru dat! But in my defense, I have flexibility in SOME things, but in some of them , not so much!</p>
<p>If your kid is making the reservations, have him include your cell phone/email in the reservation info so you can get updates. (Southwest has an option for this.)</p>
<p>The guys have carried a change of clothes in their backpacks since they were two years old (we travel a lot and this is part of our routine). Meds go in the backpack, as do phone and laptop chargers.</p>
<p>Check in online for the flight ASAP (usually starting 24 hrs prior).</p>
<p>Kids should have some cash on hand as well as a debit/credit card.</p>
<p>Didn’t plan it this way, but both my kids are on direct Southwest routes. Has made life a lot easier.</p>
<p>Be familiar with other public transit options. S2 was coming back from a football camp at Cornell, missed multiple flights due to weather delays and finally grabbed a cab from LGA to Penn Station to get the last train home that night. Barely had enough cash for the cab. (We were leaving the next am for vacation, otherwise he could have stuck it out or gone to my BIL’s in Bayonne.) It convinced him he wouldn’t be applying to Cornell!</p>
<p>Often there are buses from ‘minor’ cities to ‘major’ airports. For example, I went to college in Milwaukee, but the non-stops from there were much more expensive than Chicago, so I used to take the 90 minute bus ride, which a long time ago was <$20 each way in order to save $200+ on a RT ticket. </p>
<p>I might send my DD/DS back to the airport on one of these to save time. Life is all about trade-offs, if you want them to be on a non-stop, you might need to be inconvenienced; if you value your time more than theirs and aren’t worried about changing planes, that’s your choice.</p>
<p>As someone who’s been flying on my own a few times a year since sophomore year of high school, I think there are a few things I always do.
-Check restrictions again, even if you know them. It never hurts to look.
-Never be afraid to ask. My flight was leaving 30 minutes late, and even though I had a three hour layover, we mentioned to the airline that I was afraid of missing my flight. I ended up on a non-stop arriving 2 hours earlier than my original flight. No extra charge either.
-NEVER check baggage unless you are moving in or going international. And if your bag is a bit too big, say you’re going to carry it on anyway, it will get valet checked for free at the gate and you end up getting your bag off the plane first- can’t say how many times I’ve gotten away with this.
-Just arrive early. I get there two hours early, get to the gate, and read. Never bothers me.</p>
<p>DH was a road warrior for many years and surprised us by how adamant he was that he didn’t want D1 to have to fly to school (ah Italian daddy’s I was much more zen but I did state that I would prefer a nonstop flight school, because I’d read a lot of horror stories here on CC especially with kids coming home for winter break.</p>
<p>Now that D2 is working on her list, one of the columns in the spreadsheet is about flights & whether there is a non-stop or direct flight, and if not the flight segments she’d have to take to get home. </p>
<p>re: the credit card being presented - I have never had that issue and don’t know how they could enforce it for business travelers, as all of our tickets are charged to a single corporate credit card. I carry my own corporate AmEx, but it’s not the same number as the tickets were charged to.</p>
<p>…but when you’ve had four flights cancelled and they can’t guarantee the last flight out will go, either, a four-hour train ride home looks pretty good. (It helps when one lives along the Northeast Corridor route.)</p>
<p>DH refuses to fly to NYC. Always takes the train. It is faster and gets him directly into the city.</p>
<p>My daughter was stranded overnight at La Guardia (NYC) back in October when the second leg of her trip from Washington, DC to Ithaca, NY was canceled because of thunderstorms. She was flying back from a job interview to her campus, and the flight reservation had been made by the company that interviewed her.</p>
<p>She got into the airline’s “special services” line at La Guardia and made a reservation for the next available flight to Ithaca – which was the next day. While she was in the line, we talked on the phone. I thought it would be a bad idea for her to wait overnight in the airport because she was alone, and I thought that her possessions might vanish if she fell asleep. (Hey, this was New York; theft is a sport.) So I suggested that she get a hotel room for the night near the airport, and when she agreed, I went online and found the phone number of a nearby hotel. She retrieved her luggage and took a taxi to the hotel (paying cash for the taxi and paying for the hotel room with her debit card). Once in the hotel room, she contacted whatever people she needed to on campus (by e-mail) to let them know she was delayed.</p>
<p>Inconvenient, but no big deal. </p>
<p>As it happened, she didn’t have any desperately urgent reason (such as an exam) why she couldn’t wait until the next day to get back to campus. If she had, I suppose she would have had to take a bus to Manhattan and another bus to Ithaca. She had been to NYC before and was reasonably familiar with the Port Authority Bus Terminal. But it was already late in the evening, and that seemed like a whole lot of trouble.</p>
<p>And by the way, she got the job.</p>
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<p>Sorry your son didn’t apply to Cornell, CountingDown. He would rarely have had transportation problems. For all of Cornell’s regular breaks, there is a charter bus service that goes directly from the campus to a shopping mall in the area where you and I both live. <a href=“http://www.cbbus.com%5B/url%5D”>www.cbbus.com</a> It is cheap, convenient, and reliable. My daughter didn’t have to deal with other methods of transportation until she was a senior and needed to travel for job interviews.</p>
<p>The take-home message here is that sometimes there are special transportation services for school breaks that are not part of the regular public transportation system. Sometimes, they’re mentioned on the college’s web site. Other times, as with the bus service my daughter used, they’re not mentioned because they’re not affiliated with the college. But current students from your geographic area will know about them.</p>
<p>I always did AMTRAK (or greyound) in college on the east coast. Penn station, etc, is > Laguardia or Kennedy, if your heading for Manhattan, and not LI, Queens or Brooklyn.</p>
<p>People on the west coast (at least from California to the PNW ) seem to feel differently. Any opinions on that?</p>
<p>Let me just say that getting a call from a panicky child who has missed a flight is stressful but not nearly as stressful as getting a call from a hysterical child who has missed a bus in the middle of the night and needs to get back the next day and whose friends are all mad at her because of her leaving the outing early and therefore they don’t want to let her borrow their phones, necessary because hers stopped working after being in the rain for several hours. Well, we lived and learned from THAT experience.</p>
<p>Marian, we knew about the charter bus (and mentioned it to others who were considering Cornell). I think the experience solidified S’s thinking that he wanted to be near a major city. Personally, I would not have minded if he had applied there, and I know S1 is considering it for grad school. </p>
<p>Speaking of school-sponsored buses – UChicago runs free shuttles to O’Hare at the end of the quarter and over holidays. Cab fare is usually ~$60. S1 also reports that when he flies in and out of Midway, there are invariably other Chicago students also coming into town, and he has shared a cab many times ($20 from Midway, divided by passengers). I’ve taken the CTA 55 bus during the day from Midway to campus and had no problems.</p>
<p>Of course, it is just as easy to get burned flying out of/transferring through a major snow belt city (Boston, NYC) as it is to get stuck trying to fly out of a smaller airport!</p>
I was much more zen but I did state that I would prefer a nonstop flight school, because I’d read a lot of horror stories here on CC especially with kids coming home for winter break.</p>