Air Itinerary

Email with our air arrangements arrived Monday evening. I opened up the first one and was, shall we say, surprised to see what Oceania had come up with:

SAT 04JAN25 UA 0411 LOS ANGELES, CA 12:45 AM
SAT 04JAN25 HOUSTON, TX 05:58A
SAT 04JAN25 UA 2138 HOUSTON, TX 07:20A
SAT 04JAN25 MIAMI, FL 10:53A

In summary, a red-eye connecting through Houston. LAX to Miami isn’t quite the same as LAX to New York or Chicago, but it’s not far off. There are numerous nonstop options. I wondered why they hadn’t booked us on one of those. The flight home was pretty good too:

THU 03JUL25 AS 3429 SAN DIEGO, CA 12:25P
THU 03JUL25 SAN JOSE, CA 01:56P
THU 03JUL25 AS 3374 SAN JOSE, CA 04:59P
THU 03JUL25 LOS ANGELES, CA 06:26P

San Diego to Los Angeles via San Jose. Six hours and one minute gate-to-gate to go 120 miles. Now this one was easy to fix because we didn’t want this leg at all. Living south of LAX it’ll be much easier for us to hop on the train to get home from the San Diego cruise terminal than it would be to fly. We hadn’t actually told Oceania that yet, so it’s understandable that they tried to come up with something.

The red-eye via Houston was no good, though, so I got on the phone with Oceania. It took 45 minutes, but we managed to scrub the SD flight and credit that to our account, move the flights back a day (we want to arrive a day early both as a buffer against travel problems and to give ourselves some time in Miami to shop for last-minute essentials and things we might not want to ship out), and get on nonstops to Miami. I say nonstops, plural, because it turns out that there were not four seats available on any of the multiple American nonstop flights. So we’re split up: Jeff and Thomas will go early; Liz and DJ will go a bit later in the day. Not ideal, but it’s better than that red-eye.

Looking at the calendar it becomes clear as to why the flights are so full. This is the last weekend of Christmas break for a lot of people, and there will be lots of folks flying home on Friday and Saturday. Going to be busy at the airports!

I’m a little disappointed that Oceania didn’t work with us proactively to set the schedule. We’re dropping a lot of money on this cruise and it would have saved some hassle had they arranged a phone call where we could talk through our plans before they arbitrarily booked something. They did get it squared away though, so that’s another piece of the puzzle set.もっと詳しく