Travel in the Time of COVID

My daughter is currently on a veterinarian ‘study abroad’ trip to South Africa. This is really a make-up trip, to compensate for the one she was supposed to take to Peru last March – you know, right when COVID-19 blew up – which was cancelled (at 24 hours notice). This one was planned out well in advance, COVID vaccinations were received, her passport validated, and so on. But getting her on the plane was far from easy.

She was scheduled to fly out last Saturday – from Houston to Newark, and then Newark to Johannesburg. The airline requires a negative COVID test ‘within 72 hours of departure’. So she got tested on the Thursday, approximately two days before the flight. The results take “24-to-48 hours” for receipt, and turned up late Friday, so she’s good there.

I drop her off at the airport on Saturday, a few hours before departure, expecting it to be packed, but it was relatively calm, so I see her through to security, then leave her to it and drive home. Just about when the plane was due to take off, she texts to say the flight has been delayed. She’s concerned (to put it mildly!) because she only has a two hour layover in Newark, and is worried she’ll miss her connecting flight to SA. I assure her this is not unusual, and they’ll probably hold the connecting flight for a bit, so not to worry. An hour later she calls again, to say her flight has now been cancelled! (Storms in Newark, apparently.) And she’s having a full-on meltdown. I talk her off the ledge and tell her to go to the desk and get scheduled on the next flight she can.

The next day’s flight to SA is full already (I think they rescheduled the First/Business Class passengers first, and she’s ‘cattle’), so the earliest she can now fly out is Monday. That’s a problem enough on its own as the group she is meeting up with are expecting to leave Johannesburg on the Sunday and head to Kruger National Park, but now she won’t get there until Tuesday. Luckily I know someone in Johannesburg who was able to give me the number of a reliable car service, so I had a backup plan to get her caught up with her group, but in the meantime, it turns out two others on the same trip were also flying out of Newark and are also delayed, so the organizers agree to wait for everyone to arrive before heading to Kruger.

I head back to the airport, naively expecting to be able to just swing by the arrivals kerb and pick her up, but not so fast. Apparently there were a dozen or so flights cancelled, and they have to get all the bags off all the planes – and release them to the ‘oversized luggage’ drop-off – because sending them to a regular carousel would be too easy. (As an aside, so many people seem to travel to Houston with golf clubs – is it some kind of golf Mecca, or something?). Which takes a while. Like FIVE HOURS before we get her bag back. Her bag that literally never even made it out of the airport. But we get it (around 11pm) and I take my emotionally-exhausted daughter home.

Of course, a (now) Monday flight, when she had her COVID test on the prior Thursday is cutting it very fine. We re-read the requirements, and it says that the test results must be dated no more than 72 hours from the time of departure, and that 72 hours runs out a couple of hours after her new flight time, so we figure we’ll just be OK. To hedge our bets, she gets another test done first thing Sunday morning, but the results of that hadn’t come in by the time we head for the airport again on Monday morning, so we have to go with what we have.

We get to the airport and try to check in again, but the check-in kiosk isn’t having it. There’s two paragraphs of text relating to COVID tests on the screen. The first says (as noted) that the test results must be dated no more than 72 hours before the time of departure, but the other (handily trying to help out) provides an automatic timestamp calculation that says “Tests administered earlier than <this time> are not eligible”. And that’s a very crucial difference! Because her test results were received within 72 hours, but the test was taken more than 72 hours previously. We have to argue it up the management chain (all the time with my daughter having a full on meltdown), until they relent, but then the United boss man (who to give him credit was just trying to follow their inconsistently-documented process) points out that he can’t accept my daughter’s time-stamped text (from the pharmacy – that’s all they give you) saying “Your COVID test taken on <date> has come back NEGATIVE”, because that only shows the time the text was sent, and not the time the results were released (again, a key point). So we have to call the pharmacy who handily offer to mail the full results (showing the results release time) to us! My daughter points out that that really isn’t going to work as we’re at the airport trying to check in, so they come up with a workaround, which is that my daughter can access her results through their app. So she has to install the app, sign up for the service, accept all the medical info release disclaimers, and then ask the pharmacy to send the test results to the app. All of which takes over an hour (including one dropped call, multiple times on hold, and being passed around various departments before we could connect with someone who knew what the hell they were doing – I know it’s a ‘new’ process, but seriously, how difficult is it?).

Anyway, eventually she gets the results, we go back to the check-in kiosk, and argue again with the (new) ‘helpers’ who are again fixating on the “72 hours since the test was administered” statement – and Mr. United boss man is nowhere to be found. Again we argue, and again they finally relent, and she can check in, get through security, and get to the gate. Hurrah! This time the plane leaves on time, and she’s in Newark 3 1/2 hours later.

Of course in the meantime, the “72 hours since the test results were released” has now expired (and Sunday’s test results still haven’t shown up) so she is called up to the desk at Newark and has to explain that she was cleared for the full journey when she checked in, and she can’t help it if United have a layover (or even multiple layovers) – it’s still the same, single journey that she was cleared for… Which they finally concede, and let her join the second leg of her journey. That flight itself was delayed (by 90 minutes) and at one point they were threatening to cancel it as well, which would have just been the turd topping on this shit sandwich of an experience, but thankfully it took off with about 30 minutes to spare.

Today she arrived in Johannesburg, met up with the rest of her party, and is probably busy vaccinating lions or something by now. If you follow her on Insta, or are friends with her on Facebook, you’ll probably see some photos. Let me know how they are – she refuses to connect with her father on any social media, so the next I expect to hear from her is when she calls to ask me to pick her up from the airport in Houston, in three weeks’ time…

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