"It's Time to Fly"

Borrowing the post title from the latest United advertising slogan, we're finally sitting in the YRV (Vancouver) Maple Leaf Lounge for a few minutes and just about to board UA #818 to ORD (Chicago-O'Hare).

We were a little late leaving the house but the border and the traffic in general weren't bad late Sunday morning. We did spend well over a half hour at the United check-in counter as two agents worked diligently to fix our "upgrade" dilemma. We'd called our own dedicated help line a couple of days ago but they told us the airport agents could fix it promptly when we checked in - heh...

Without getting too technical, we were set up to fly to Chicago on valuable international upgrades; however, the upgrades for our flight onward to London almost surely won't "clear" In other words, we would have "burned" upgrades that put us in Business Class to Singapore or Australia by flying YVR-ORD and onward to LHR in Economy. These two employees finally sorted it out (we think) after talking on their own help line for more than 20 minutes. We'll have to check our "upgrade" record on the notorious United website in a few days. Right now it's still a little confused.

We thanked the two employees because they worked long and hard to fix the problem. They seem to dislike their UA website as much as we dislike ours, but they were professional and friendly to us throughout.

Then Brian got picked for secondary screening at the security checkpoint. Ah well, it'll be nice to settle into our seats for the first leg of this particular trip.