Charmed

J. phoned me this morning to say 'hey, sweetie, we're leading a charmed life'. I was sort of caught 'off-guard' - I was in a meeting, and wasn't expecting him to call that early. It's not like I don't agree with him - we are very happy and content and crazily in love. So 'charmed life' is a good description. But I said 'oh, OK - what's up'? ('What's up' is kind of our signal for 'hey, I'm really swamped or with someone or on a call - code for 'make it snappy, sweets, 'cuz I've got to run). And he said 'the airline we flew to Hawaii on just shut down today'. I was so shocked - in that 'oh my gosh we are so lucky this happened THIS WEEK and not same time last week. Of course, we would have ended up having (possibly) a couple extra days in paradise. But we would have probably had to pay a lot more to get home.

I feel really bad they had to shut down. It's a shame that the 'no frills' airlines with fewer planes and fewer routes are finding it impossible to stay afloat. It's sad. And I feel horrible for all the stranded people.

I am very, VERY glad that I did NOT end up booking tickets for Hawaii next Spring or Thanksgiving - which I almost did. Really. Pretty darn close to clicking 'buy' more than once since we've been home. They also had something called ATA FlightBank which allowed you to purchase credits in advance and use the credits for tickets - it was about a 50% discount off published fares but you had to buy a minimum of credit per person - and the lowest level was $1650 each - so I'm REALLY glad I didn't do THAT. We'd be out a lot of money - though hopefully, our credit card company would have probably covered it for us.

Isn't that CRAZY? I can't get over it. And what I'm MOST glad about is that we didn't take their offer to stay another night for $300 credit on our next flight for all of us, plus hotel and meals. 'Cuz those credits are worthless now.

Guess we'll be back to paying through the nose and flying on United. Maybe I'll also check out Hawaiian Airlines.