How To Avoid Airport Problems

Last week I was in Atlanta for a training class and experienced an eventful day of travel on my return trip. As a brief recap and my tip to you on how to avoid problems at the airport:
Pay Attention To The Details
With a return flight scheduled for the early evening hours on Friday, I decided to head to the airport early when my class completed ahead of schedule on Friday afternoon. After briefly checking the list of departing flights, I found two earlier flights to be desired airport that would get me home before my originally scheduled flight.
The line for the flight check-in was not too long so I took my place in line to try and change my flight. When my turn came up, I walked up to the agent and informed her of my desire to change my flight. After exchanging a few pleasantries and a $25 fee, I had my new boarding pass and was on my way to the security checkpoint.
As I crawled through the security checkpoint, something compelled me to look at my boarding pass and I noticed that it was not for the airport that I had mentioned to the agent. Doh! Since I drove myself to the airport rather than take a limo, I was now presented with the situation where I was flying into an airport where I had no means of transportation to get to my car or back home.
When I arrived back at the check-in counter with a growing frustration about how the original agent would make the mistake of changing the destination airport, the line was much longer and I spoke with an agent that directed me to a shorter line to try and resolve my problem. As I spoke to the next agent, they informed me that my original reservation was to the same airport and I indicated it was not but the agent had switched it. Again I indicated that was not right and pulled out my original paperwork, doh!
That’s right…my original travel reservations had me flying into a different airport than I had departed from at the beginning of my trip. As I alluded to earlier, if I had paid attention to the details when my travel reservations were made, I would have noticed the mistake my corporate travel department had made and would have changed it then. Unfortunately I didn’t and I was now faced with a dilemma.
The airline agent informed that they could switch my flight to the desired airport and everything would be fine. However, when they asked if I had any bags to check and I noted that I had one that was already checked for the other flight, I was told that I would not be able to change the flight. Doh!
After a call to an administrative assistant at my office, I learned that there were no limos available to drive me to the other airport upon my arrival. My wife was not home and she isn’t too fond of the idea of driving to the airports in this area anyways, so I had to think of something to get me from the one airport to the one where my car was parked. In the end, I opted to rent a car from the one airport and turn the car in about an hour later at the other airport.
While everything worked out, I could have easily avoided my problems at the airport by simply paying attention to the details. Whether that had been changing my travel plans through my corporate travel department before ever leaving on the trip or recoginizing the mistake at the airport before changing the original flight, I had multiple opportunities to catch the mistake but failed to do so.
As a final lesson in all of this, I think I have decided that driving myself to the airport problably just isn’t worth it and will take advantage of the limo in the future. If you are preparing to depart on a trip, do yourself a favor and double check everything and pay attention to all of the details.