Why can't they cancel my flights on the inbound when I don't want to go back to work?

I was scheduled to fly out last night to Madrid, leaving on a Thursday night and returning Tuesday day. That's four full days in Spain. I barely managed to get through the work week keeping this trip in mind.

Then it got cancelled. They claim 'weather delays' made it so that I wouldn't make my connecting flight. There was so much chaos and confusion and misinformation going on that it was just sad. They'd tell people who needed to rebook to 'stand right over there' and then ignored them for 10 or 15 minutes, before sending over ONE person to help the 40 or 50 of them. And it's funny, because flights were leaving our airport just fine. And my Madrid flight left Philly just fine. Maybe there was a weather delay isolated to landing? Sounds suspicious to me.

Since it's a weather delay they don't have to give us squat in compensation. Luckily I live here. All the international travellers from National Airport in DC yesterday missed their connections, and those who didn't live here had to book and pay for a hotel themselves. No meal credits either. No compensation of any sort. In fact, they tried to take away my business class seat when they rebooked me! This was on USAirways.

Anyway, hopefully I'm leaving in a few hours, to try again tonight. This time I scheduled a 3-hour layover on my international connection. Of course, I still have to pay for the hostel that I couldn't get to in Madrid -- only fair, as they were holding it for me and I cancelled late. And I still have to pay for the international call made to make sure I still have a reservation. Seems like the airlines should have to pony up for something.

Just venting. Necesito una cerveza, pronto! :-)

ebell, sorry to hear about your weather-related bad luck. That is a shame. In another thread we were discussing the likelihood of making connections on international flights with little layover time. I think 3-hour is a good MINIMUM amount to schedule. You'd think most travel agents would know this, but many of us, like me, I do most of my arrangements online and they, with their "automatic/automated" e-brains, may not take into account the current slow check and security lines.

But I agree. It's a shame they didn't cancel your return flight like they did mine a few years ago (got on a flight 4 hours later, but still had to wait in an airport in SPAIN at least). Hope you have/had a good time!

Speaking of cancellations--Continental just cancelled out flight back from Madrid to NJ on Dec 31st. They also cancelled the flight on Jan 1, so we have to return a day earlier on Dec 30th. They said this is part of the flight reduction plan since Sept 11th. It looks like they are trying to save paying their employees New Year's holiday pay . (We bought tickets before Sept 11th.). Seems its too late now to get any other options around the holidays.

That seriously sucks about your flight. I completely hear where you're coming from. I bought a ticket from Sabena back in August for my study abroad in january, and as we all know, they went out of business. I was lucky, because I charged the ticket and got all my money back, but it took them about 3 weeks just to give me the refund. Luckily, I was checking the student deals on the computer tonight, and about 15 min. ago I bought a ticket with continental for $332 R/T. Thats including taxes and everything! Good luck with your stuff!

I made it there, and back again, and all was good. A little disappointment, but I recovered.

Popular opinion at the airport was that everyone could have made their international flights anyway. But oh well. Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.

Ebell:
Hope you had a nice cold Mahou when you got to Madrid.
In AirOps, lots of things get blamed on the weather that have nothing whatsoever to do with the weather: President Bush was in Philadelphia last Thursday (the day you were supposed to connect in Phila for US Airways to Madrid). And the weather was fine! My guess would be that a temporary restriction was put on the Washington D.C. Philadelphia airways, a 'no fly' box that just happened to impact you. I had that happen to me once and it wasn't even when the U.S. was on full alert.