Aloha, Aloha
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Returned to Palo Alto last night, which was the original plan, but also a little surprising. When we left home, I had been thinking we might end up stranded on vacation for an extra day or two. We booked our travel plans late, and weren’t able to get seats on a return flight from Hawaii to the Bay Area on Saturday, Sunday, or even Monday by the time we left. I’ve discovered that the flight booking sites don’t update availability regularly. So even though there were fares listed on various sites (United, American, Expedia, Orbitz), if you tried to book them, various warnings and errors appeared, encouraging you to call an agent, who told you there weren’t really any seats. I decided we’d just head out on vacation and sort it out after we got there.
Airline news while we were on vacation wasn’t encouraging; American Airlines cancelled a few hundred flights due to equipment problems, then Hawaii’s Aloha Airlines went bankrupt again last week, and has shut down all flight operations effective today. I had looked at flights on Aloha, but they fly to Oakland which is less convenient from here, and there weren’t any seats available anyway. It would have been a good story to be stuck in Hawaii for a while, but we ended up finding a few open seats on a non-stop flight to SFO. Oh well.
Update 04-03-2008: ATA Airlines also declared bankruptcy today and has shut down flight operations. I had also been looking at some ATA flights connecting through Las Vegas as a fall back route to get home, but they were sold out over last weekend also. Looks like it could be harder to find a cheap flight to Hawaii for a while.
Tags: hawaii, travel, vacation
