We had plenty of time to kill at the airport a couple weeks ago.
My 2-year-old wanted to spend it doing escalators. We couldn’t find a pair of up and down escalators next to each other. Instead we found a down escalator next to a flight of stairs. When I finally dragged her away an hour later I had done enough stairs to increase my actuarial lifespan by a few years.
I had lots of time to get to know the other people on my flight. One guy told me he had booked a ticket on ATA a few weeks ago. Hours after he booked, ATA announced it was ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy.
My first thought was, “You book a flight and hours later the airline goes bankrupt. You’re hexed. Don’t stand close to me.”
My next thought was, “I hope you read my blog and know you should book airline flights with a credit card.”
He had indeed booked with a credit card. He called the credit card company to ask how to get his money back. They told him they had advance knowledge of ATA’s announcement and avoided charging it through. His got his money back on the spot.
It’s nice to see that something I wrote about actually works in the real world!
A Lot of People Have Worthless Airline Tickets Right Now
There are a lot of people holding worthless tickets right now. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Five U.S. discount carriers have either declared bankruptcy or gone out of business in the last two months: Frontier, Aloha, Skybus, Champion and ATA, a unit of Peachtree City-based Global Aero Logistics.
If they didn’t book with a credit card, they will next time!