littlekiwi
I charge by the hour for anything before noon
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2012
- Messages
- 10,794
Gee it’s expensive and stressful! It’s stressful enough dealing with the intricacies of getting ready for a job interview but adding sorting out last minute travel, waiting for the family bank to loan you more money and it’s a bit of a mess. Now I will say the recruiter did offer me a skype interview, I declined as I always prefer in person interviews and had planned if I was successful that I would go down- I think you can get a better feel for the workplace culture and what they do by being there. Bear in mind I’m booking Tues/Wed for the following Mon to Wed so less than a week away. Firstly the accomodation that I use due to its location has no single rooms available (only Sun/Mon and I need Mon/Tues).Then the better airline when it comes to special assistance only had cheap flights really early(6am, check in at 5, leave home at about 3.30 and no public transport to the airport) or really late (9pm) or fares that cost close to $700.....no thanks!., Next step was to see if the gold class overnight bus was available as it would have been cheaper plus saving me a night of accomodation but it was sold out. I then found a package deal with a twin room with bunk beds where I wanted (for two nights it’s fine - still get the whole room to myself) plus decent flights with the other airline - it’s only an hour long flight for about $360.....yahoo! So I added 10% to it to give family a estimate of how much to deposit into my bank account when they went out today cause I knew I wouldn’t be able to book it til today......wake up this morning and see the lunchtime flight I wanted had jumped up by $170 and there was only one bunk room available.....panic started setting in cause by this time my grandma had left home so I couldn’t get her to add the missing $170 to what she was depositing. At this point I was super undecided as to what to do, pay the difference myself, book a later flight, change what days I’m there to Sunday-Tuesday....I then decided well I’ll just book the mid afternoon flight which is way cheaper than the one I really wanted so booked my flights and accomodation through Expedia who could do a package deal......story should be over, right? Nope! I couldn’t see how to book the special assistance I need at the airport on Expedia (I’m visually/hearing impaired plus walking/standing for long periods can be a challenge especially later in the day). Now as much as the airline gets flack for how they treat people with disabilities at times I was pretty sure this would be an easy phone call. It was sort of. I got special assistance booked fine for the trip down but no staff were available at AKL for the return trip so they said we can shift you to a different flight if you’d like and I was like ok, is there assistance for the flight that leaves 50 mins earlier (I said that flight as the price when I booked was fairly similar and it was a similar time anyway) and they said yes. My next question was then how much will the change cost? Their reply was........free since you’re booking special assistance......my jaw was almost on the floor cause the fare I had booked was such a basic fare to start with and since they’re known for charging for everything under the sun basically (luggage, specific seats, food etc).
