Communication, or lack thereof, when most needed
After landing in Santiago in the Amazing Race-esque journey from Northern Chile, I tried contacting Copa to change the flight from March 23rd to an earlier day, ideally in a few hours. After a surprisingly short wait time on the phone, I made it to an agent who notified me all flights are over-booked for the next 4 days. Sheise. After looking up other options leaving Santiago (LATAM, AA, Air Canada) and realizing they’re all over 3,000$, we headed to town for an Airbnb we booked as we boarded the previous flight.
Needless to say it was a shit-night’s sleep. Come morning, we started searching for flights all over. It seemed like prices are changing all the time, and we tried to catch a good one.
OJ found a flight into Toronto (the goal was to get into Canada ASAP) leaving in two days, and we booked it on CheapOAir. Glad we made a move, we headed to grab breakfast in the same place as we did the first time we arrived in Chile. A problem rose when we failed to get a confirmation from the website, or from LATAM, hours after we booked. Stress level rises further.
I was hardly able to touch the food at breakfast, worrying this flight fell through, and was trying to multitask eating and alternative-flight searching, succeeding only on the latter. An American Airlines flight came up, at about 1,000$/person, one-way to New York, that departs on Wednesday night (all of this is happening on a Monday, by the way). I booked it quickly, to make sure it doesn’t magically become 5,000$, and got the confirmation immediately. Phewish.
Five minutes later, I’m getting a call from CheapOAir calling to confirm the original flight 🤦🏽♂️. At this point, I just cancelled it.
The idea to book a flight to NYC instead of all the way to Canada came from the understanding that we might not actually be able to make it into Canada. Having a plan-B ready was key — and in our case, it meant going somewhere that will allow us to easily board a flight to the UK or Israel, where we have citizenships.
The rest of the day passed in two main forms:
- Checking for alternative flights that we might be able to change into, finding one or two that could be valid, trying to contact the airlines, and failing to do so with calls never going through or never being answered.
- Staying on top of the news from Canada, Chile, US, UK and Israel. This was exhausting, time consuming and somewhat harder than one might think, as the amount of sources out there is ridiculous and the formal statements sometimes require much digging.
As part of the efforts to get more information I’ve been reaching out to the Canadian and Israeli embassy’s in Chile, while OJ tried the British one.
The British never answered, only with a generic email 2 days later.
The Israeli embassy was easy to get a hold of, but not very useful (to be fair, the questions I had were not very relevant and they would not have the answers). Retrospectively, I learned of at least two repatriation flights from Israel to Peru, so clearly, they’ve been doing stuff.
The Canadian was hard to get, but we managed to talk early in the morning after. My main concern, as I mentioned before, was whether we could go back into Canada as temporary workers. Unfortunately they had no valuable information — according to them, there was no official Foreign Affairs policy on whether temporary workers will be able to come back, and it might be up to the discretion of the border agent.
With all the information in hand (and new info flowing in constantly), we decided to stick to the plan:
- Get out of Chile 🇨🇱
- Get to a main hub with good worldwide connections 🇺🇸
- Get into Canada 🇨🇦
- If fails, go to Israel 🇮🇱 or the UK 🇬🇧
Now, we had nearly two whole days of waiting, before we can start our journey to the northern hemisphere.
