Our flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok left at noon so we woke up early just to give us some extra time. It takes about 45 minutes to get to the airport from Chungking Mansions, where we stayed by train with one transfer. When we got to our transfer station which was below IFC mall (and no it wasn't frat life IFC), we thought we'd checkin and save time in line at one of the flight checkin stations. This is where things started going downhill. Our checkin assistant told us we could not checkin because we transferred flights in mainland China and we didn't have visas. This was news to us because we didn't know you needed a visa to simply transfer flights in a country even if you never left the international terminal. Also, our original flight never even flew into mainland China but went directly to Thailand. We quickly tried to call Cheaptickets.com (the agency who we booked through)to tell them that they never told us we needed a visa after redirecting the original flight we booked (although we still should've known better) and that they needed to change our tickets to ones directly to Thailand but, we couldn't get through to them on a pay phone. So, we boosted up into the mall desperately looking for wifi. After asking around we finally found wifi and with an hour left James called them using google phone to try and change our tickets while I'm researching same day flights directly to Bangkok. James is on the phone with them for 30 minutes when our phone call randomly cuts out! Frustration Nation! The cheapest flight I found was for $225 each and we were like screw it lets book it, go to the airport and make moves. The problem with doing this was we booked through another travel agency (we hadn't learned our lesson yet) and were issued an eticket where we had to wait on another email after they confirmed my credit card. By, this time it's noon we'd missed our flight and already spent an extra $225 each on a direct flight that left at 9:30, thinking that the worst was behind us. When we arrived at the airport we asked information where our checkin was and they told us that the station didn't open till 6:30. Seriously, six hours in the airport just waiting to see if we can checkin! Through all this and the entirety of our entire trip, I must applaud James for being so willing to ask questions and for help, because I'm much more like we can figure this out on our own and that would've been a huge waste of time. So we mess around six hours in the airport the entire time refreshing my email. Nothing for six hours. We quickly adopted Murphy's law "if it can go wrong it will go wrong" and started looking up flights for the next day just in case. 6:30 rolls around and we try to checkin even though the eticket email has yet to come. The lady coldly denies us simply saying without a ticket number you cannot checkin. After talking to a manager he tells us that even though we can show him that I paid showing him my iPad, that it looks as though the ticket never went through. He told us that we need to find another flight or book directly through the airline which was a cool 700 bone crushers each. Filthy! There were no more flights out that night and the cheapest flights out the next day left at around 9pm so we leave the checkin counter thinking we are making Terminal 2 #yoro2012 edition starring Panda and Diesel.
We're starting to laugh at how bad everything is going so far until we sit down somewhere for a little bit and at about 7pm I get the best email ever. Our eticket numbers and confirmation. We boost up to the checkin counter and happily checkin but there's a hitch. We hadn't booked a flight out of Thailand and they wouldn't let us into the country without one (our original plan had been to bus out of Thailand into Laos. You're probably thinking these clown babies didn't do a single second of research. We looked up flights out of Bangkok into Hanoi, Vietnam, and after thirty minutes we find one for 70 bucks using skyscanner.com. (Thanks Max) We clearly hadn't learned a single lesson so far, because we used another agency instead of going direct and once again had to wait on an eticket confirmation. We went up to the checkin desk and we hoped that the third time was the charm and luckily it was because we hassled the same lady who told us we still didn't have an eticket confirmation into asking a coworker who said we'd be ok as long as we showed customs officer the receipt. From here on everything goes smoothly but it was the most distressing travel day of my life and we learned countless lessons. Yoro!
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