Hello from Madrid, Spain! About a half an hour ago, we finally checked into our hotel, and we’re all taking some much needed time to veg (or nap, as is the case for the rest of my group). This follows ~21 hours of travel, not including the prep time from earlier in the weekend, so we are definitely beat. Plus there was some added stress to deal with…
Hence the title. You can know going into it that everything worked out, but it was a crazy situation to handle. I was able to check in the three of us online for our flights, 24 hours ahead of time. We had gotten a great deal on Basic Economy flights, so I wanted to make sure to do it immediately, ensuring the best chance at good seats. This worked out well for our long leg to Madrid, where we had three seats together. But our first leg from Tampa had none of us sitting together – not even our one-year-old, who was set to be all by himself in a middle seat!
An alternate title for this blog post could be “what to do when an airline doesn’t seat you next to your children,” because friends – they obviously couldn’t let our toddler sit by himself on the plane, but there were no available seats for me to move any of us into online. Of course our flight was completely booked! I contacted customer service, and after some back and forth, they said that “of course [I would] be seated with him,” but they couldn’t guarantee we’d be sitting with Tyler. However, they said that the seats that are assigned currently couldn’t be changed until arrival at the airport.
Queue us getting to the airport bright and early to settle this matter. After waiting in line for 30+ minutes, we found out that the folks at the check-in desk couldn’t help us either. It had to come from the gate agent (something you could be more clear about next time, Delta). So we had to wait until about an hour before the flight, when a gate agent appeared, to ask for this change. She actually was able to handle it very quickly, as the airline had held three rows as “unavailable,” presumably in the event something like this happens. In the end, we were able to sit all three of us together. The rest of our flight journey to Madrid was a little bumpier, but that’s another story.
I hope that you can learn from me! The recommendation you’ll see a lot is to just not book Basic Economy, so you can select your seats; however, this isn’t always an opportunity financially. Don’t waste your time reaching out to customer support or spending time at the check-in desk after seats have been assigned; either contact customer service ahead of the issuance so they have a flag that at least one parent needs to be with your child, or go straight to the gate agent after seats have been assigned.
Traveling with children is complicated enough without figuring out how your kid is going to manage by himself on a plane between two strangers – here’s to a smoother rest of the trip!