Prague Journal

Tuesday, January 11, 2005.

I went down to the Czech Airlines office to straighten out the credit-card payment for Matt’s plane tickets for his visit here in March (that we had thought were taken care of two days ago, having gotten a confirmation of our online order), and, after an hour’s wait and half-hour conversation with the ticket agent, left the airline office with the impression that everything had been straightened out. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This evening I was on the phone (collect to the US) with VISA, who claimed that they had our US address listed correctly (in addition to our Prague mailing address) and Matt was on the phone to the New York office of Czech Airlines, who said that our US address could not be verified and therefore they could not issue the ticket as ordered (since only US-credit cards can be used for tickets issued to people departing from the US). Czech airlines does not issue e-tickets, so Matt needs a “real” ticket to board. We had run into the reverse problem when we ordered our tickets to Greece in September. Our tickets were sent to the US, so we had to have them express-mailed here since we were boarding from here. Despite our instructions – and the obviousness of the departure airport listed on the ticket – they sent our tickets to Denver. This time the airline wants to send the tickets here, and want an additional charge for having them issued in the Czech Republic instead of the US departure airport. Go figure.
Since I wasn’t aware of the extent of the airline ticket and credit card mess, I had a nice relaxed lunch with Charlotte this afternoon. I then came home and spent some time working on Eva’s and my proposal for the summer conference in Brno, before I had to race out the door to the Women in Business dinner. The WIB group says it meets on the first Monday of every month, but the last two dinners have been on the second Tuesday of the month. Actually, the reason for the change in scheduling has been the restaurant, which has had private parties booked on both Mondays. Mondays used to be the “dead” day of the week, but I guess that is no longer true.
My brain is certainly dead this evening after hassling with the plane tickets and credit card. And I still don’t know if the tickets will be issued or if we’ll have to start over and pay the now-higher fare.

posted by JWinn @ 8:54 PM