As much as I love taking, editing and sharing my photos, I’ll keep you waiting a little bit longer for Part Two of the Spain photo tour. I wouldn’t want you to be bored going on two tours in a row.
So, instead, I will tell you another travel story from last summer.
I didn’t know anyone living closer than 40 minutes away from me in Madrid last summer, until I met Manuel. Conveniently, she was au pairing for Eva and Anas’ best friend, who just happened to live in the same apartment complex as us. After she arrived just a week after I did, we quickly became close and ended up spending almost every day together last summer. I was so lucky to have her.
Neither of us had ever been to Barcelona (and I wasn’t coming home from my second summer in Spain not having visited Barca), so we decided to spend a weekend there. We had a really fun time, until it was time to fly back to Madrid on Sunday evening.
The problem stemmed from not being able to check-in to our flight beforehand. We had roundtrip tickets with Vueling. I was able to check-in to our departing flight from MAD-BCN just fine (because I used the desktop check-in version on my laptop), but we didn’t take our laptops to Barcelona. So, the only way we could check-in to our returning flight was through our phones.
Let me tell you, though, from a UX (User Experience) standpoint, Vueling is wack. We tried multiple times to check-in on our phones from the Vueling “it’s time to check in to your flight” email, but the link from the email would never take us to the check-in page. We figured it wasn’t a huge deal, and we could just do it at the airport, since Manuel had checked-in to our departing flight from an airport kiosk. Little did we know (until I talked to my host parents when I finally got back to Madrid that night) that Vueling only lets you check in from your phone on its mobile app. Thank you, Vueling, for being shady and not telling us in your dozens of emails that your wack airline has a caveat.
Anyway, we got to the BCN airport a little over an hour before take-off. I’m very Type A, so I plan and plan and plan, and try to arrive at an airport for a domestic flight about an hour and a half early. However, our Cabify (Spain’s version of Uber) was running late to pick us up, which is why we couldn’t get there an hour and a half before, already making me a little uneasy when we jumped out of our Cabify.
We headed straight for the check-in kiosks and typed in our information. We expected the next screen to say “confirmed,” but instead we got booted out, and the kiosk told us to try again. We tried a couple more times, still getting the same error page. A screen finally popped up after three tries saying that “Vueling check-in closes an hour before the flight takes off.” Again, thanks, Vueling. Thank you for giving us zero heads-up about this fun, little tid-bit in your bombarding “don’t forget to check-in emails.” It’s kind of a poor form of communication if an airline doesn’t let its customers know all of its terms, if you ask me.
We started panicking, but remained focused and ran around the airport, trying to locate the Vueling help desk. Ironically, they were of no help and said there was nothing they could do for us.
Okay, this is when we sat down on the airport floor, and I’m not going to lie, I cried. They were not understanding of the situation that their company had put us in and made us lose our money (because there were no other flights headed to Madrid that evening), not to mention they were rude. And I was panicking because how would that look to our host families if we couldn’t get home that night, when we had our au pair responsibilities in the morning?
All we had were our phones that were getting a spotty connection to the airport WiFi, so it was hard to look up alternative ways to get home. We were looking at train and bus options at this point.
We were NOT happy campers that night.
I called my dad on WhatsApp, hoping that he would pick up when I really needed him to, come to my rescue, and be able to buy us train tickets from a stable and secure website (Renfe is the popular train booking website in Spain, but its website doesn’t always give you a secure connection and sometimes glitches during the check-out process).
Thankfully, he picked up the phone. Renfe wasn’t working for him, but he was able to buy us train tickets off of some third party website that would get us back to Madrid that night. Or so we thought. He went through the whole check-out process, making sure the departure date was for that night before he confirmed the payment. It was correct. When he got the booking confirmation email, though, the website had changed the date to the following week (thankfully the next day he was able to get a refund from that third party company that scammed him). Sheesh, this was such a fiasco. (Oh, and quick side note, try to avoid buying any kind of travel tickets on third party websites at all costs. I’ve never had a good experience with them.)
So, since Renfe was glitching for us and no buses were getting back to Madrid that night, what was our next move? I was trying to stay calm and think rationally. We called my host parents and told them the stressful situation we were in, hoping they could help.
My host dad told us to head over to the train station across the street from the airport to explain our situation to Renfe customer service and ask if they had any tickets available going back to Madrid that night. I calmly tried to explain in Spanish to the first customer service rep, who then made us walk over to a different rep’s office. We sat down in his office, and after I tried explaining our situation and that we really needed to get home tonight, he said there wasn’t much he could do to help us because there weren’t any more tickets available. I was stressed.
I relayed this back to my host dad, who told me to hold on and that he would try to talk to this customer service agent. Of course, after he talked to him, the agent said two tickets “magically” became available. My host dad asked if we would be fine coming back on separate trains leaving an hour apart. Obviously this wasn’t ideal, but we were fine with it if it meant we could get home.
Ten minutes later, my host dad called me back again. This time, the now loyal customer service agent told him that now he could get us two tickets back on the same train.
We finally made it home (thank the Lord) around 1:30am, after having been at the airport/train station since 5:00pm (our original flight was only supposed to be an hour and 15 minutes long). We took a two and a half hour AVE train home, and once we got back into the Madrid train station, we had to do our usual hour-long metro ride home, to the very last metro stop on the line, on the last metro running that night.
If there’s anything I learned from this, it’s to download the Vueling mobile app to check-in, and it never hurts to have a native Spanish speaker on your side when you’re in Spain. This experience also demonstrates my natural ability to think rationally and work through stressful situations.
I hope you got a few laughs out of this story; Manuel and I always laugh about it now, but at the time, it was so not funny. More importantly, however, I hope your takeaway from my experience is that there’s more to traveling than just meets the eye, like beautiful travel pictures. Traveling can throw curveballs your way, but it’s how you catch those curveballs and pivot to overcome them.