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I recently got back from a vacation trip to South Korea. It was a group trip sponsored by my Tae Kwon Do school, and I've been working OT and 3 part time jobs to save the pennies to go.
It was worth every extra hour, every extra effort to get all my ducks in a row to do this. I had a blast.
Of course, I did look for SCs while I was over there. Didn't see a whole lot of them, actually. Koreans are very polite people. I didn't need to speak the language; prices are clearly marked in Arabic numerals, the exchange rate is easy to figure out. I found I got a lot of mileage with clerks with a smile, a bow, and "Kamsamnida (thank you)." Go figure.
Straws are for suck
I did see a couple of minor episodes of suck when I visited the 2012 World Expo in Yeosun. We stopped at a KFC to eat because one of our group was an 8 year old who didn't like Korean food. We didn't realize that Koreans spice everything up, so traditional or crispy wasn't available, just their spicy chicken, which was still good.
A Korean boy had connected several straws together and was using it to shoot loogies at people in the crowded store from the back of the crowd at the counter, until one of his buddies grabbed it from him.
Horning aroundLater that evening, we were sitting on a bench outside the Expo waiting for our tour bus to pick us up. The streets were VERY crowded, and the local cops were doing traffic control, directing all the tour bus traffic plus other local traffic. If they hadn't been, the tour buses would have completely blocked the flow of traffic picking up and dropping off tourists.
One tour bus driver starts laying in on his horn while waiting to make a right hand turn. The car in front of him can't turn because the cops have ordered him to wait; another tour bus up the road is picking up passengers.
Finally me and another of my group start yelling at the guy, "Knock off the horn! Can you see the cop won't let the guy make the turn?"
We're pretty sure he didn't understand English, but he did understand the attitude. He stopped.
Circular roadblock
The real suck was on the trip home. The flight from Inchon to LAX was largely uneventful, except for having to deplane in Sapporo Japan, go through security, and replane because the plane was changing flight crews and picking up new passengers. The crowd wasn't well managed, and we barely made it back to the gate in time for boarding. But everyone was polite.
LAX is #1 on my list of worst airports ever. It's aging, inconvenient to navigate, and crowded. Both going out and coming home we had to hustle from one end of the air port to the other by going outside in the heat. No trams, no shuttles (none that I saw), no moving walkways that modern airports have to help you move faster.
We finally get to the terminal with the United check ins so we can check in our luggage for the flight back to Greensboro, but are stopped by a crowd of people from the Middle East, in full regalia, milling around in this big circle, blocking all traffic into the terminal. Our group leader tries a quiet excuse me and is roundly ignored.
My feet were killing me; I have plantar fasciitis and aggravated it the day before. I could barely walk and was in no mood for this. I yelled out, "Excuse us! Make a hole!" and used my arms to gesture for the Red Sea to part. The group leader was mortified and told me to calm down. I said, "They weren't going to move. Two of them looked me dead in the eye; they knew what they were doing." And sure enough, they moved.
Reservation follies
So we finally get to check in. Our group leader has all the paperwork for our flight; we couldn't get e tickets because we flew out too early, apparently so we didn't have our boarding passes yet. The agent said he couldn't check in our luggage because it was more than 12 hours before our flight time.
Huh? We were supposed to fly out in a couple of hours and told him so.
Nope. After much hemming and hawing, and looking at the computer, it took him twenty minutes to figure out that no, our flight was scheduled to leave at midnight. It was 11am, LA time.
Somewhere along the line the airline changed our reservation. We had to pay $75 a pop to change it back, and then play $25 a pop to check our luggage (a fee that was not disclosed to us when we booked or we would have paid it in advance--and when we had been rebooked on a Delta flight on the trip OUT from Greensboro 10 days earlier when our United flight was canceled, we didn't have to pay a baggage fee).
Code Bravo
So we end up with a 1 hour lay over. Our bags are checked in. We head over to security to go through that process yet again. As we are waiting, a bell rings and a TSA agent yells out, "Code Bravo!" The agents make everyone freeze in their tracks, literally. We're not allowed to move. The agents stand around looking bored, doing nothing, for five minutes when the original agent then announces, "Thank you for participating in our drill." and things move on.
Gah. The TSA is such a colossal joke.
Hurry up and wait
We had a one hour layover, like I said. Waiting to board wasn't bad; we had time to grab something to eat and drink, and watch some of a Korean drama on a laptop. I looked at our boarding passes and got a little nervous; we had an 18 minute layover in Chicago, and no way to know how far we'd have to walk to get to the new gate from where we deboarded. My experience at O'Hare is you always have to go to another terminal. Fortunately, though, O'Hare has these shuttles for moving the elderly and disabled around; I planned to ask an agent to make sure one was at the gate for me because my foot was getting worse.
It ended up not mattering. We board, and sit for two hours because Engine 1 would not start. Mechanics look at it, and can't figure out the problem. Our group leader was getting a little nervous about our connection, but I told her, "forget it. We've already missed it. We'll just have to hope we can rebook when we get there."
They deplane us so a full mechanic crew can work on the plane, and are sent to customer service to rebook. While we're in line, another customer gets on his cellphone to the main CSR folks and starts ripping her a new one because the answer we're hearing at the airport is pretty much everyone will have to spend the night at the air port and fly out in the morning. Given that it was still early afternoon, this was not acceptable to a lot of folks, including this guy.
Now letting United know the problem was not acceptable was one thing. Tearing into the CSR for fifteen plus minutes, with some very bad langauge, was another. Even though I was hurting badly and just wanted to be home in my own bed, I knew that the CSR couldn't magically wave her wand and get the plane back in the air.
Or maybe she could. A few minutes later, an announcement came over the intercom for our flight to reboard.
Then we spent another hour waiting to leave the gate for a computer problem. They didn't tell us that part until we were in the air.
We still could have made a connecting flight. The pilot had been able to make up lost time in the air. But we had a 15 minute window to connect. The stewardesses let other customers off first to make their flights, but not us; they told us we'd never make the connection and wouldn't let us try. We were quite aggravated but couldn't do anything about it.
We weren't served dinner. We didn't even get peanuts, just a drink (which I shouldn't have accepted; it put my bladder into overdrive).
So we're directed to the customer service desk for the terminal when we get in. We got off and headed straight to it, beating out most of the crowd, but when we got there, the guy at the desk said he was closing and not taking any new customers other than the ones already in line. He told us to go to the Concourse C desk.
So we hustle over there, followed by the herd. It got quite crazy there. A supervisor walks by wanted to know why we didn't use the Concourse B terminal; we told him.
He got quite upset. The agents at the B CS desk had told a whopper of a lie. The supervisor took about half of us back to Concourse B to take the pressure off Concourse C.
My group remained at C. We got on the phone to the main CSR desk and got vouchers for a hotel and meals. The gal at the desk processed it and was very friendly; told our group leader how to use the online system to recoup the $75 we'd paid (actually she paid for us) to change our flight earlier in the day. We grabbed a shuttle to the hotel and crashed.
Of course we had to go through security A GAIN. Gah. Oh, one interesting note. When you fly in Korea, they don't make you take off your shoes for security, and they are much MUCH faster and efficient than the TSA.
Finally we made it home.
I will never, EVER fly United again. EVER. While most of the individual people we talked to were very nice, the administration of that airline are clowns. The system is inefficient and inconsistent. Not worth the hassles to save a few bucks. I'll pay more for a better experience.
It was worth every extra hour, every extra effort to get all my ducks in a row to do this. I had a blast.
Of course, I did look for SCs while I was over there. Didn't see a whole lot of them, actually. Koreans are very polite people. I didn't need to speak the language; prices are clearly marked in Arabic numerals, the exchange rate is easy to figure out. I found I got a lot of mileage with clerks with a smile, a bow, and "Kamsamnida (thank you)." Go figure.
Straws are for suck
I did see a couple of minor episodes of suck when I visited the 2012 World Expo in Yeosun. We stopped at a KFC to eat because one of our group was an 8 year old who didn't like Korean food. We didn't realize that Koreans spice everything up, so traditional or crispy wasn't available, just their spicy chicken, which was still good.
A Korean boy had connected several straws together and was using it to shoot loogies at people in the crowded store from the back of the crowd at the counter, until one of his buddies grabbed it from him.
Horning aroundLater that evening, we were sitting on a bench outside the Expo waiting for our tour bus to pick us up. The streets were VERY crowded, and the local cops were doing traffic control, directing all the tour bus traffic plus other local traffic. If they hadn't been, the tour buses would have completely blocked the flow of traffic picking up and dropping off tourists.
One tour bus driver starts laying in on his horn while waiting to make a right hand turn. The car in front of him can't turn because the cops have ordered him to wait; another tour bus up the road is picking up passengers.
Finally me and another of my group start yelling at the guy, "Knock off the horn! Can you see the cop won't let the guy make the turn?"
We're pretty sure he didn't understand English, but he did understand the attitude. He stopped.
Circular roadblock
The real suck was on the trip home. The flight from Inchon to LAX was largely uneventful, except for having to deplane in Sapporo Japan, go through security, and replane because the plane was changing flight crews and picking up new passengers. The crowd wasn't well managed, and we barely made it back to the gate in time for boarding. But everyone was polite.
LAX is #1 on my list of worst airports ever. It's aging, inconvenient to navigate, and crowded. Both going out and coming home we had to hustle from one end of the air port to the other by going outside in the heat. No trams, no shuttles (none that I saw), no moving walkways that modern airports have to help you move faster.
We finally get to the terminal with the United check ins so we can check in our luggage for the flight back to Greensboro, but are stopped by a crowd of people from the Middle East, in full regalia, milling around in this big circle, blocking all traffic into the terminal. Our group leader tries a quiet excuse me and is roundly ignored.
My feet were killing me; I have plantar fasciitis and aggravated it the day before. I could barely walk and was in no mood for this. I yelled out, "Excuse us! Make a hole!" and used my arms to gesture for the Red Sea to part. The group leader was mortified and told me to calm down. I said, "They weren't going to move. Two of them looked me dead in the eye; they knew what they were doing." And sure enough, they moved.
Reservation follies
So we finally get to check in. Our group leader has all the paperwork for our flight; we couldn't get e tickets because we flew out too early, apparently so we didn't have our boarding passes yet. The agent said he couldn't check in our luggage because it was more than 12 hours before our flight time.
Huh? We were supposed to fly out in a couple of hours and told him so.
Nope. After much hemming and hawing, and looking at the computer, it took him twenty minutes to figure out that no, our flight was scheduled to leave at midnight. It was 11am, LA time.
Somewhere along the line the airline changed our reservation. We had to pay $75 a pop to change it back, and then play $25 a pop to check our luggage (a fee that was not disclosed to us when we booked or we would have paid it in advance--and when we had been rebooked on a Delta flight on the trip OUT from Greensboro 10 days earlier when our United flight was canceled, we didn't have to pay a baggage fee).Code Bravo
So we end up with a 1 hour lay over. Our bags are checked in. We head over to security to go through that process yet again. As we are waiting, a bell rings and a TSA agent yells out, "Code Bravo!" The agents make everyone freeze in their tracks, literally. We're not allowed to move. The agents stand around looking bored, doing nothing, for five minutes when the original agent then announces, "Thank you for participating in our drill." and things move on.
Gah. The TSA is such a colossal joke.
Hurry up and wait
We had a one hour layover, like I said. Waiting to board wasn't bad; we had time to grab something to eat and drink, and watch some of a Korean drama on a laptop. I looked at our boarding passes and got a little nervous; we had an 18 minute layover in Chicago, and no way to know how far we'd have to walk to get to the new gate from where we deboarded. My experience at O'Hare is you always have to go to another terminal. Fortunately, though, O'Hare has these shuttles for moving the elderly and disabled around; I planned to ask an agent to make sure one was at the gate for me because my foot was getting worse.
It ended up not mattering. We board, and sit for two hours because Engine 1 would not start. Mechanics look at it, and can't figure out the problem. Our group leader was getting a little nervous about our connection, but I told her, "forget it. We've already missed it. We'll just have to hope we can rebook when we get there."
They deplane us so a full mechanic crew can work on the plane, and are sent to customer service to rebook. While we're in line, another customer gets on his cellphone to the main CSR folks and starts ripping her a new one because the answer we're hearing at the airport is pretty much everyone will have to spend the night at the air port and fly out in the morning. Given that it was still early afternoon, this was not acceptable to a lot of folks, including this guy.
Now letting United know the problem was not acceptable was one thing. Tearing into the CSR for fifteen plus minutes, with some very bad langauge, was another. Even though I was hurting badly and just wanted to be home in my own bed, I knew that the CSR couldn't magically wave her wand and get the plane back in the air.
Or maybe she could. A few minutes later, an announcement came over the intercom for our flight to reboard.
Then we spent another hour waiting to leave the gate for a computer problem. They didn't tell us that part until we were in the air.
We still could have made a connecting flight. The pilot had been able to make up lost time in the air. But we had a 15 minute window to connect. The stewardesses let other customers off first to make their flights, but not us; they told us we'd never make the connection and wouldn't let us try. We were quite aggravated but couldn't do anything about it.
We weren't served dinner. We didn't even get peanuts, just a drink (which I shouldn't have accepted; it put my bladder into overdrive).
So we're directed to the customer service desk for the terminal when we get in. We got off and headed straight to it, beating out most of the crowd, but when we got there, the guy at the desk said he was closing and not taking any new customers other than the ones already in line. He told us to go to the Concourse C desk.
So we hustle over there, followed by the herd. It got quite crazy there. A supervisor walks by wanted to know why we didn't use the Concourse B terminal; we told him.
He got quite upset. The agents at the B CS desk had told a whopper of a lie. The supervisor took about half of us back to Concourse B to take the pressure off Concourse C.
My group remained at C. We got on the phone to the main CSR desk and got vouchers for a hotel and meals. The gal at the desk processed it and was very friendly; told our group leader how to use the online system to recoup the $75 we'd paid (actually she paid for us) to change our flight earlier in the day. We grabbed a shuttle to the hotel and crashed.
Of course we had to go through security A GAIN. Gah. Oh, one interesting note. When you fly in Korea, they don't make you take off your shoes for security, and they are much MUCH faster and efficient than the TSA.
Finally we made it home.
I will never, EVER fly United again. EVER. While most of the individual people we talked to were very nice, the administration of that airline are clowns. The system is inefficient and inconsistent. Not worth the hassles to save a few bucks. I'll pay more for a better experience.
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