Well, we finally made it to Merida!
After having problems literally right out of the gate (gate E15, American Airlines flight #309) with a 6:45am flight from Minneapolis to Miami, we're at our final destination. Leaving from Eau Claire, Wisconsin (my hometown) at 3:30am on August 30th with my mom, dad and sister, we arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport where my family sent me on my way. I got through security and arrived at my gate with one large suitcase for checked baggage and two smaller carry-on bags - a backpack and a smaller suitcase. When I was just about to sit down to wait until our 6:15am boarding time, I heard someone say, "Hey, Jaren!" and looked over to find several of the 8 students I'd be going on this trip with. Immediately, I felt much more calm and relaxed. Prior to this trip, I had never traveled alone... much less flown by myself. We boarded the plane right on time, only to get all settled in and hear that we had to get everyone off the plane because someone broke the baggage door on the outside of the plane (or so we were told). A little discouraged, we joked about getting our bad luck out of the way, and ended up being switched to Delta flight #2322, scheduled to leave at 10:10am. We went to the Delta gate we were told to go to in order to speak with a red-haired guy named Gary. Gary got us our new tickets for 10:10am and sent us to Delta's baggage service department on the other side of the airport to arrange for our bags, previously checked onto American Airlines flight #309, to get moved instead to Delta 2322. After about 30-45 minutes at the booth, we had all of our bags moved to our new flight. We headed back, boarded, and left on Delta at 10:10am. Right on time. We also landed on time, around 2:15pm. We went down to the baggage claim area, at baggage claim #5, and none of us were able to find our bags, despite arriving early with the rest of the passengers. One older woman, flying from Minneapolis to Miami who also got transferred to the Delta flight, said that she was just going to Miami, and did not have another connecting flight... Among the transferred passengers, even she was not able to find her bags in the baggage claim area. We then spoke with Delta baggage services, and they said that they did not have a record of receiving our bags. We then went to the American Airlines booth, and American Airlines said that if we just landed with Delta, and Delta did not have a record of our bags, then they were most likely going to be arriving on American Airlines flight #309 later on in the day. We were happy to hear that we would be able to know that our bags were going to arrive that day, before we had to check into our hotel in Miami at 3pm. We waited and waited at the airport for the shuttle, which was supposed to arrive every 30 minutes, but instead waited over and hour, upon which time we called the hotel, and asked where the shuttle was. They said that it was on its way, so we waited around for another 30 minutes, still without a ride from The Regency (the name of the hotel) at which time we decided to Google our hotel's location, and find nearby hotels, since literally every other hotel had shuttles arriving almost every 10 minutes. We ended up jumping on the Crown Plaza shuttle next to our hotel, and promptly walked over to The Regency. They took 30 minutes to issue us our hotel room keys. Finally, we made it to our rooms, with our very light luggage loads, and went to go eat at this nice little Cuban restaurant called Latin Cafe 2000, where I had a sandwich called "Frita Cubana Con Queso," which was very good. We then went back to our hotel and hung out for a bit, playing some get-to-know-each-other games to loosen the thick cloud of tension over our lost bags. It goes without saying that we had made about 40 phone calls to each airline by this time, so we were not simply just hanging around without attempting to make progress on this fiasco. We went down to study abroad orientation with a man named Hector who told us all about what we needed to know for the next three months. We also informed him of our luggage situation, and he took us to the airport around 9pm to again speak with both American Airlines and Delta. We sent half of our group to American Airlines customer service, and half of our group to Delta. I ended up in the group that went to Delta, and we spoke with them and learned that they were the ones technically responsible since the way airlines coordinate responsibility for lost baggage is that whichever airline the bags are registered under is the responsible airline... Even though the bags technically never made it to a Delta flight. When our other group that went to American Airlines customer service returned, we found out that the representative for American Airlines had been extremely unhelpful and rude in their interaction. Both airlines had essentially blamed the lost bags on one another, and neither was willing to really make any serious attempts to find them. It seemed like we would spend 45 minutes talking to one customer service rep, and then they would tell us that their shift was over and that "someone else would be happy to help us." We ended up staying at the airport until around 11:30-midnight, returning to our hotel with new information that no one actually knew if our bags had left Minneapolis, had stayed in Minneapolis, or which flight they would even be at. Even worse, they said there was a pretty good chance that the bags would arrive the next day around noon, when we had flights OUT OF THE COUNTRY ranging from 9:45am to 10:45. There was even the possibility that they had gotten expedited to Caracas, Venezuela because the baggage crew had thrown them in a different area so that we would instead receive them when we got to Caracas, versus where we were initially supposed to get them: at the airport in Miami. When we returned to the hotel, we again called each company around 4 times, with no success. We went to bed, nervous for tomorrow. Waking up the next day at precisely 5am, we got breakfast and arrived at the airport at 5:30am. We spoke with both customer service departments again, and also checked all of the baggage claim areas where they said our bags might be. We were told that Minneapolis was likely where our bags were located. We were upset and confused, because these 8 bags were still missing. The reason we were confused is that two of the other students had received only one of their two checked bags (I only had one bag, and it was still missing). We made sure that each customer service department knew that we were flying out of the country that morning, and that they would know what to do should our bags be found (which would be to ship them to Caracas or Merida). Both American Airlines and Delta told us that we would likely have to make a claim (to get reimbursed for our lost baggage) in Caracas. They repeatedly stated how impossible it was to start or file any type of claim while in Miami. We boarded our flights (we were split up into different groups for these), and left the country. We arrived in Caracas, and again waited for over an hour to look for our bags at the baggage claim at the Caracas airport. Upon our arrival, the customer service departments at the Caracas airport told us that we were supposed to file a claim with the airlines in Miami. We got our VENUSA representative, Francy Gonzalez, to come to the airport to be a force of authority on the matter, and she somehow convinced them to file the claims on the missing luggage. We walked out of the Caracas International Airport and about a block away to the Caracas domestic travel airport, where we boarded a flight to El Vigia, a town about 2 hours by bus away from Merida. This was the only smooth part of our trip so far. We landed and met a tour guide named Ramon, who took us on this 2 hour bus drive and dropped each of us off at our respective host families' houses around 10pm that night, which is at the time of this writing.
