Search Results for: blog holiday travel nightmares

Get Paid to Share Your Travel Nightmare

Remember the travel nightmare I experienced trying to get from Wisconsin to Hawaii for my beloved grandmother’s funeral? I’ll never forget it. Also, I was never compensated by American Airlines for it. Cough. Cough. Ahem! However, I could still win for losing, and so could you. Thanks to a contest being sponsored by MedjetAssist, you could win a major prize if you have what the company deems “the most engaging and harrowing travel tale.” The more horrific, the better your chances of claiming the grand prize: A free five-night vacation for two at Lost Iguana Resort and Spa in the … Continue reading →

How Not to Travel with Kids This Christmas

I’ve had my share of travel nightmares flying back and forth from Chicago to Hawaii with my daughter. While our mishaps make for funny blogs, I would prefer experiencing incident-free trips. Then again, even the shortest vacations with children can lead to high drama, which is why most parents spend countless hours researching and planning the best ways to avoid meltdowns while on the road or in the air. Believe me; you can not over-prepare when it comes traveling with kids. It’s a lesson parents from North Carolina learned the hard way this week. When Jason and Kathy Fickes of … Continue reading →

Tis the Season Not to Travel

If you don’t like crowds, being patted down by strangers or paying bizarro travel fees, then you are better off staying home rather than going over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house for the holidays. But can you really celebrate Turkey Day without grandma’s stuffing? According to AAA, most of us can’t, which is why an estimated 600,000 Americans plan to hit the highway and nearly 33,000 plan to catch a flight to spend Turkey Day with loved ones this year. If that’s not enough to make you pack some extra Pepto, consider that travel experts predict … Continue reading →

Unwelcome Travel Experiences

Subtitle: My Flight From Hell I don’t travel long distances during the chaotic summer months. I’ve had such horrible experiences flying off-season that I don’t even chance boarding a flight during the months of June, July or August. To prove my point, let’s review my last flight to Hawaii. It was by no means a vacation. Rather, three months ago I was forced to fly 10,000 miles roundtrip to attend my beloved grandmother’s funeral. I decided to take my 6-year-old daughter along since she and my grandma shared such a sweet relationship. Unfortunately, American Airlines cancelled our direct flight to … Continue reading →

The Ultimate Travel Nightmare

Imagine witnessing a horrific traffic accident, pulling over, then learning that while you were rendering aid to an injured motorist someone else stole your car. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s exactly what happened to two guys in Minnesota recently. Longtime friends Chase Torgerson and Cody Charpentier were driving along a northwestern Minnesota highway when they saw a car fly through the air and crash into a median. According to police reports, the men jumped out to help, and as they were tending to one of the injured victims they saw one of the other passengers from the crashed car hop … Continue reading →

Holiday Travel Nightmares

In my previous blog Mother Nature vs. Holiday Travelers I discussed how the horrendous winter weather conditions wrecked havoc on millions of Americans trying to get home in time for Christmas. Here in Wisconsin we were slammed with rain, fog, ice, snow, and high winds that created white out conditions. To say it led to travel nightmares is a severe understatement. In fact, last night the local news profiled a family from Bosnia who has been living in the baggage claim area of the Milwaukee airport for past 8 days. In Chicago one couple reportedly spent 3 days in the … Continue reading →

Turkey Time Travel

Welcome to November. It’s the first day of the second to the last month of the year. Thanksgiving is exactly three weeks away. And you know what that means… let the travel nightmares begin. Thanksgiving is undeniably one of the busiest travel times of the year. However, not everyone is loading up the family to go over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house for a lavish turkey spread. Some folks use the extended holiday weekend to go skiing, while others take their family reunions on the road and let hotel chefs whip up their Thanksgiving meal. If … Continue reading →

Tips for Dealing with Stepfamily Holiday Stress

When holidays become nightmares instead of joyous occasions, it’s time to do something different. It takes effort and everyone has to be willing to compromise. Now, some people might stop me there and say, “You don’t know my ex or her (his) parents!” No, I don’t know them, but I know what I had to deal with in the past, and it wasn’t pretty. Even if your ex and his or her family are difficult, you can find ways to make things go more smoothly. I hope some of these tips will prove helpful. Put the Kids First If all … Continue reading →

Check Store Policy Before You Shop

One of the good things about shopping is that depending upon what you want to buy, you have at least a couple of options of where to buy it from. This is especially true if you consider the wide variety of things that are available online. Many factors like price and convenience will probably influence your decision of where to buy something. There is another important factor that you may want to consider when you are making a choice about where to shop – company policy. Policies for returns, price adjustments, and just about any other customer service issue that … Continue reading →

When Airlines Go To Far

I thought I experienced a horrific string of events on my May flight to Hawaii for my grandmother’s funeral. Turns out a California mom just catapulted herself to the head of the shafted-by-an-airline club. Melissa Bradley set off a media storm when she went head-to-head with United Airlines following the commercial carriers’ decision to give her and her infant daughter the boot from a recent flight. The California mother told news reporters that she bought a separate airline seat for her baby. However, when she boarded the Hawaii-bound flight from San Francisco she found the economy class seats were too … Continue reading →