5 Things I Learned Flying On The Worst Travel Weekend This Summer

It's no secret that the summer of 2022 is a terrible time for air travel. Flight cancellations for the first six months of this year have already exceeded the total for all of 2021, making this year the second-worst year for flight cancellations, surpassed only in 2020, when the onset of the pandemic took hold. brought air travel to a near-stop.

Flight cancellation statistics can look like abstract numbers, though, until it happens to you. I know because it happened to me. As a speaker at the Collision Conference, I flew from Seattle to Toronto over the weekend of June 18-19. Exaggerated travel demand, nationwide storms and staff shortages combined to make it the worst weekend for air travel on record, though that record may have since been broken. I learned a lot from that experience and from the research I have done since. Here are my top tips for surviving air travel this summer.

1. Technology can really help you...

Less than 24 hours before my scheduled flight to Toronto, my smartphone rang with an automated call from the airline notifying me that there had been a "change" to my flight and apologizing for any inconvenience. The computer-generated voice offered no further information, so I opened the airline's website to see what was going on. It turned out that the word "change" distorted the truth a bit. I had originally planned to fly Seattle-Toronto with a brief layover in Calgary. They had now booked this second Calgary-Toronto flight as a flight to Winnipeg with a 27 hour layover, followed by a flight to Toronto which would get me there a full day later than planned. There were no offers to accommodate me for my night in Winnipeg.

At first, besides being angry about the canceled flight, I was also annoyed that I didn't get a call from a human to tell me about it. But when I thought about it, I realized what was great about this system: it alerted me to the problem much faster than human beings could have, especially considering how many people be affected by this and other flight cancellations this weekend. This allowed me to get the information I needed immediately, and time is running out when it comes to canceled flights.

2. ... but you also need human assistance.

Recently, flight attendant Kristie Koerbe shared some tips for surviving the horrors of air travel this summer. Among his suggestions: Book your trip directly with the airline. The idea is that you'll have better bargaining power if your flight is canceled or severely delayed.

Koerbe is a flight attendant and she certainly knows the system better than I do, but I respectfully disagree with that advice. Or at least I disagree if your top priority is to get where you're going as close to your originally scheduled time as possible. If minimizing additional costs is your top priority, then his approach might be better, I'm not sure.

What I do know is that it was not possible to reach anyone at the airline, although I tried my best. It's a problem that at least one beleaguered airline CEO has publicly acknowledged. Luckily for me, I hadn't booked my flight directly with the carrier - I had used an online travel site, a site where I was able to get agents by chat or phone quite reliably over the years. So I did now, and once again I was able to reach someone with relative ease. The agent I had on chat arranged a refund for my "modified" flight, and I used the travel site to book a replacement trip on a combination of two airlines. Admittedly, this led to a considerably higher rate, but on the other hand, it saved me from having to rush for a hotel room in Winnipeg. And it got me where I was going when I was meant to be.

It stands to reason that a travel agency dealing with multiple airlines, as well as hotels, car rental companies and many other forms of travel, will not be as overwhelmed by an increase in customer service request that an airline will be during high cancellation time. At least, that's how it worked for me.

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