Testing the Waters with Dori: A “Funny” Thing Happened on the Way Home from Easter Island

Air travel these days can be challenging, to put it mildly.

Between staff shortages and mechanical problems, delays and cancellations, it can be a real test of patience and resilience to get from Point A to Point B by air without losing one’s cool.

Add in human error and indifference – and, sadly, even spitefulness – and air travel can be a downright nightmare.

On my recent bucket list vacation to Northern Chile (the Atacama Desert) and Easter Island, I experienced the worst of what air travel has to offer. Thankfully, I also experienced some of what the best in hospitality can do when they care (looking at you Best Western).

It actually began with our first and second flights of the journey.

I’ll keep this piece short as both of these delays (one a 40-minute delay, the other a 12-hour delay) are sadly par for the course of flying these days. Both flights – Newark to Houston and then Houston to Newark – experienced mechanical problems (this despite the fact that our Houston-to-Santiago plane had been sitting around, apparently uninspected, most of the day).

Being a professional traveler, I had built in a day in Santiago before we had to fly to Calama to get to the Atacama Desert. When all the dust was settled and we’d spent an unexpected night at the glamorous Comfort Inn at Houston airport, we’d only missed out on our free day in Santiago.

We breathed a sigh of relief. Clearly, the worst was behind us.

You can see where this is heading, right?

The next week that followed was a dream come true. The Atacama Desert is truly mind-blowing. Easter Island is thought provoking and fascinating.

Our stay at the two Nayara Resorts, especially Nayara Alto Atacama, were spectacular…

… until at the very end of our vacation the staff at Nayara Hangaroa made a decision that started a domino effect that turned the dream into a nightmare.

Strikes at the Santiago airport delayed our outgoing flight, so our transfer was pushed back. Instead of departing at noon for a 2 p.m. flight, we were left the resort at 1:15 p.m. We arrived at the airport just as our plane was landing.

However, for whatever reasoning that Latam calls logic, the airline didn’t “officially” push the departure of the flight back – this despite the plane actually leaving after 3 p.m.

As a result, by the time we got to the airport, the check-in for our flight was closed.  

Mr. Supervisor didn’t care that the plane was late. Very late.

He didn’t care that the luggage at the tiny Easter Island airport hadn’t come close to being loaded yet.

He didn’t care that we had to be in Santiago to make our first flight heading back to the United States in the early morning hours of the next day.

Mr. Supervisor was indifferent.

Of course, he didn’t need to be anything else. Latam is the only airline that serves Easter Island. It can do whatever it wants to. There are no alternatives.

Luckily – or so we thought – we were already checked in online. We could walk to the gate with our bags and gate check them.

Unfortunately for us, Mr. Supervisor was also spiteful.

Spying that my bag was not carry-on sized, he refused to let me go through security with my suitcase. Didn’t matter to him that I could gate check my bag, he wasn’t going to give an inch.

Ironically, I’d like to point out this all went down on Nov. 13, aka World Kindness Day. In a world where you can be anything, he chose to be anything but kind.

While my husband was able to go through and make the flight to Santiago, I had no choice but to pay $38 for the next flight. Scheduled to get in at 11 p.m., that gave me two hours to make my international flight.

Want to guess what happened next?

That second flight was also delayed. By the time I got to Santiago, where my husband was waiting for me to race to the COPA desk to check in for our flight to Panama City, the check-in for that flight had closed.

I was in tears.

The COPA agent spoke Spanish to the other agent and giggled. She told us if we wanted help, we’d have to get a Latam agent to call them to explain that their flight had been delayed and that’s why we were late. Only then could she look into rebooking us on a flight the next day (well, technically the same day, since it was now after midnight on Nov. 14.)

Want to bet on whether Latam would help with this?

By 2 a.m. I was on the phone with United to get booked on United flights out of Chile. First available was a 10:45 p.m. to Houston that night, then a 7:45 a.m. to Newark the morning of Nov. 15.

(It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I probably could have called the travel advisor who booked our international flights. She has an afterhours service that might have been able to help us. In my agitated state, this never occurred to me.)

We asked Latam to take care of our hotel that night. It was their flights that were delayed after all.

Not their responsibility, the agent said. All delays were because of the strike.

Didn’t matter anyway, he added. With all the delays and cancellations, all the hotels were already full.

He wasn’t kidding. We spent the next hour seated on the airport floor making phone calls to hotels. Nada.

I finally found a Chilean online hotel booking platform that said there was a single room at a Best Western some 25 minutes from the airport. How strange, I thought, but thank goodness.

I booked it and we Ubered to the hotel.

Drum roll please… They didn’t actually have a room.

According to their records I had booked for the night of the 14th and, of course, check-in wasn’t until 3 p.m. that day.

I showed them my receipt, two nights – the 13th to the 15th – for $720. (My mistake here, though I have travel medical and evacuation insurance, I had not taken out trip interruption insurance.)

They apologized profusely, even though it wasn’t their fault. (First apology of the entire debacle other than an apology on my husband’s flight for the long delay.)

At least a couch in a hotel lobby is more comfortable than the airport floor.

Ten minutes after we settled onto the couch, the night manager came over. He’d checked his inventory. Two rooms had never been checked into. If he could get an official cancellation, he could get us into a room.

Finally, someone who cared that things had gone horribly wrong. Someone who cared enough to make an effort, to try and help. (Best Western, I’ll never say a bad thing about you!)

By 4:30 a.m., he’d gotten us into one of those rooms.

We slept late, had a surprisingly good lunch in the Best Western restaurant and headed off early to the airport, where thankfully everything went off without a hitch and we were back at Newark airport by Friday afternoon.

As someone who travels a lot, I feel like we had done everything right that we possibly could (other than the travel insurance, that was a mistake).

We used a travel advisor for the entirety of our Chile trip, including domestic flights and most transfers. We used another advisor for our international flights. We arrived early when it was up to us and depended on our included transfers in every other case. We had every document we needed.

Should I have insisted on our transfer leaving for the airport earlier? Should I have called my advisor and asked for her advice? It didn’t even occur to me not to trust the resort’s decision. Should I have called the resort and asked them to speak to spiteful, indifferent Mr. Supervisor?

I’m curious, what would you have done in my situation? Was there something I could have done that I didn’t do? Or are we simply sometimes at the mercy of people who don’t care enough to want to help?

Email me at dsaltzman@travelmarketreport.com and let me know how you would have handled this.