Who would think that buying our tickets would be so exciting?!?

After receiving the authorization of our legal status Sunday evening, I called to make reservations.  My main concern, aside from the cost of the tickets, was if there would be enough seats remaining on the flight we wanted to take, and I was delighted that there were.    So I made the reservations, at which time I found out that the discounted price wasn’t $806 per person, as I had been told.  Instead it was $922.30 per person, and $762.30 for children under twelve.  It’s a good thing that five of the seven kids traveling with us are under twelve, so the total ticket purchase ended up being only $250  more than we anticipated.  $118 increase per person for nine tickets would have been a nice chunk of money to have paid out!

Then we had to email the authorization form and the confirmation of our reservations to the NY office.  The next day, I got a call from the NY office representative, asking for credit card information; making tickets for returning citizens is a three step process, so we couldn’t pay until this point.  I gave her our credit card number, and a few minutes later she called back to say it had been declined.  I was pretty shocked and knew something must be wrong (we keep a low balance and pay our card in full every month), but she was very impatient, so rather than take a few minutes to call the credit card company and figure out what was going on, I gave her our debit card number, asking her to wait five minutes so I could transfer the funds into my bank account.  (I love online banking!)

She called back a short while later to say that was declined, too.  Well.  By this point I realized both my bank and credit card company were blocking the purchase since it’s not in line with my typical purchasing habits, and told her I’d call the credit card company to ask them to allow the charges.  It was the end of the business day for her, so I had to wait until the next morning.

This morning, I called the credit card company and quickly got that straightened out.  I then spent over 45 minutes on hold with the airline, waiting to pay for my tickets. (I think it’s good business to make it easy for people to pay you, don’t you?)   When I finally got to a live person, she told me that we had reservations for 8 people.  ‘No, nine people,’ I corrected.  No, she insisted, so I asked her to read me all the names of the people she had reservations for, and realized that dd14 had been dropped.  I told her I could email her the confirmation in which everyone, including dd14 was listed, but she didn’t want it. So she made a new reservation for her.

Then she informed me that I needed to send the authorization and confirmation to the NY office before I could pay.  ‘No’, I told her, ‘I did that already and the NY office was already in touch with me about payment – that’s the reason I’m calling!’  I told her the card had been declined because my credit card company blocked the charges, but I had that lifted and I wanted to complete the payment.  So I gave her the number, she read it back to me, and I waited on the line while it was processed.  ‘Declined’, she told me.

Now I know this isn’t possible, but she was very abrupt and impatient and wouldn’t repeat back the number of the card she had used.  She asked me if I had a debit card, and I told her we’d already tried that the day before yesterday and the bank wouldn’t allow the charges.  I asked her again to tell me the number of the card she had used, and she waffled back and forth, asking me insistently several times for the number of the card I wanted her to use (as if I had given her anything but one to start with).  She finally admitted she tried my debit card instead of the number I had given her and she had repeated back to me (it was listed on my record from the day before, apparently).  Well, that explained the problem.

So she processed the card she was supposed to, it went through, and we’ve received all of our etickets. 😛

Departure date – three and a half weeks to go – Aug. 14!

Avivah