[takiskonst]

SimonS1 :
Thanks for the reminder. It was a single ticket.
Yes, it was Amex who booked it. When I was at the airport, I had 2 choices: either call Lufthansa (because SAS refused to give me information) or Amex. On the advice of an SAS staff member, I called Lufthansa. I spent 1 hour on the phone before I got a reply.

[SimonS1]

@takiskonst

Interesting. To be honest if it was a choice between holding on for an hour to speak to the airline or what would no doubt have been a 5 minute call to the travel agent I would always choose the latter. Not being funny, but you are paying the TA to do a job and they could well have resolved it quite quickly, possibly even re-routing you via somewhere else like London and getting you to the Conference on time.

I would defend the rudeness of SAS in any way, however airlines are notoriously quick to back pedal when things go wrong. Give them half a chance and they will fob you off with the first thing that comes into their heads, whereas the TAs often have competition and a reputation to defend.

[takiskonst]

SimonS1:

You may be right. In hindsight, I should have done that. To be fully honest, I didn’t even consider calling Amex immediately. Reasons:
(1) I followed the instructions I was given by the people at the airport.
(2) I sincerely thought Lufthansa and SAS should be able to get me a flight and give me information. This has always been the case in my 30-year travel experience.
(3) When I thought of Amex, I was already on the line waiting for Lufthansa. I had little time ahead and didn’t know whether it would be faster to hang up and call Amex.
(4) Here, in Sweden, the Amex office closes at 5m and, after that, they charge 20 USD (approximately) for a phone call. That would not have been a problem if I knew they would reply. But would they? How should I know? I had to take a decision under uncertainty.
(5) It was Friday afternoon and the middle of the summer. Given my experience with Sweden, I wasn’t hopeful I’d get any response from a Swedish office.

(Two years ago, a Swedish guy, husband of my wife’s colleague, died suddenly in the summer. This being summer, in Sweden, she was unable to get hold of funeral offices for days. Once she did, they told her the body had to wait for 2 months before it gets buried because everyone is on vacation. If you don’t live in Sweden, you probably don’t know how things freeze in the summer. Based on this and other experiences, and since I had little time ahead, I decided to stick to my phone call to Lufthansa.)

Finally, I had no clue that travel agents are more responsible than airlines. I thought that airlines had a reputation to defend too. Thanks for letting me know! The ticket was bought for me, not through a personal travel agent, but by the travel agent of my university, via the university, and charged to my research grant from the Swedish Science Foundation.

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