It occurred to me at that point that if I accepted a boarding pass for a flight that arrived too late (11 p.m.) to connect with Destiny, American Airlines might feel they had done all they could while Carnival might feel we had made a poor decision and thus taken the responsibility for getting us to our ship out of their hands by our bad decision-making. With boarding of flight AA1299 already underway, I decided to leave Ryan at the gate agent's desk while again I tried to call Carnival from a pay phone.
This time when I got a customer service representative, I explained my situation, and indicated that we were standing at the gate of a flight leaving Miami for San Juan that would be the last flight to arrive in San Juan in time for us to embark the ship prior to its scheduled 10 p.m. departure. This service representative, at my request, located a supervisor (or manager?) by the name of Gloria. Gloria listened to the truncated version of the story and indicated that if I could give her 10 minutes, she had several telephone numbers of American Airlines managers and supervisors on the ground at Miami Airport she could contact to get an authorization for the necessary boarding passes. Since I did not have a way for her to call me, we agreed that I would call her back in 10 minutes.
Exactly 10 minutes later I called Gloria. At that time, she informed me that she had left voice messages on a variety of phone lines including cell phones, but not one person had returned her call. Therefore, she had nothing to offer me in the way of assistance. She said, "remind the gate agent that cruise passengers are supposed to get priority, go back and make your best flight, and do everything you can to get on board that aircraft before it goes. Otherwise, I imagine there will need to be a plan to charter a plane and get to St. Thomas to meet the ship while it is in port there". Since it was quite clear that again there was to be no help from Carnival, I decided to get off the phone and back to the gate agent as boarding of this flight was already well underway.
By this time I had been "in travel mode" since 6:30 in the morning and it was 4:40 in the afternoon. We had not been fed any meal on the Toronto-Miami flight and had been so busy running around the Miami airport trying to get a connection that we had not managed to connect with food or drink. I was certainly not willing to entertain the idea that we would either spend the night in Miami at an airport hotel, or in San Juan at an airport hotel, and then be AGAIN back in airports the following day looking for a ship in St. Thomas when we should already be snug in our cabins and sleeping soundly on that same ship.
Back to the gate agent I went and this time I was quite clear. "Carnival has informed me that absolutely you should give priority to cruise passengers. There are many of us here who are trying to get to San Juan and board ships that depart at 10 p.m. This aircraft that is leaving is the last one arriving prior to 10 p.m. (8:37 p.m.) and even then it will be tight. I'm sure that Carnival's agreement with American Airlines is that AA is to do everything necessary to get Carnival passengers onboard the ship before it sails. There will be no mistaking, when Carnival reviews today's events, that our missed connection was due to American's equipment malfunction in Toronto and then a domino effect from there. I am begging you .. I don't care if you put me in the lavatory and strap my children onto each wing, but we absolutely need to board this aircraft if we are to reach our ship in San Juan before its departure time. " All the time I was saying this, the gate agent was issuing boarding passes to waiting passengers who presumably were ticketed but not yet issued seats on AA 1299.
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