Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine who was leaving on an early morning flight for a vacation. We were just chatting in general about flights, bookings and how reservations were particularly tight at this time of the year when he said, “You will never believe what happened to me!”
“What?” I asked in hopeful anticipation.
“Well,” he began probably sensing the vested interest behind my curiosity, “I had made my booking in November and when I called to check it last week they said that although there was no problem with the flights to the specified destination there was no record of any reservation that I had made for my return journey.”
“That’s odd,” I remarked, “but then again what airline were you traveling with?”
“Saudia,” he confessed.
“Oh! Saudia,” I repeated rolling my eyes. “They always manage to muck things up. I can narrate to you a whole chronicle of how completely ordinary things can become like an episode of the Twilight Zone when you’re traveling Saudia.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but knowing that they’re not exactly on the ball I had not only made the reservations through them, but had a computer printout just in case.”
“Well you should have told them.”
“I did,” he replied, “but you’ll never guess what,” he challenged.
“What?” I demanded wanting to be regaled with all the juicy details.
“When I read the printout it had the return booking right there with an ‘OK’ next to it and I told the Saudia agent on the phone. He looked into the bookings details on the computer and insisted that there was no return.
“‘Yaakhi,’ he said, ‘maafi return.’”
“I told him, ‘Fi confirmed return on the printout that your reservations office has given me.’”
“He then asked once again for the PNR number, which I double-checked and everything seemed in order. I was so fed up at this point that I asked him to just forget about the fact that I had originally had a reservation and to make me a new one.
“To my astonishment, he said, ‘Maafi flight on that date.’
“I was exasperated and said, ‘Of course there is a flight to Riyadh on that date! I made a reservation for Jan. 14 myself and I even have the printout here right in front of my eyes and now you have the nerve to tell me that I can’t just remake the booking that you have canceled because there is no flight?’
“He said, ‘OK. One minute I see.’ And then a few seconds later, ‘Sorry but there is no flight. Bas there is flight on the 13th. I can make you reservation on the 13th.’
“By now I was fuming so in order to reassure myself of my own sanity I carefully and slowly re-read the printout in my hand. Guess what?”
“What?” I asked knowing by now that anything was possible.
“They had given me a return reservation for Jan. 14, 2005!” he lamented.
“2005? But what on earth were they thinking!” I exclaimed not entirely surprised.
“I asked the guy if there had been a flight on Jan. 14, 2005 and he checked and confirmed that there had been. I told him that this was the reservation they had given me. He kind of panicked a bit and said that there was no way this could be possible. ‘Mustaheel. Impossible!’ he decried. ‘Our system would never be able to accept this. Our computers cannot do this.’ I think I should frame the printout,” my friend concluded.
With all the competition springing up from rival low-cost airlines, perhaps Saudia should seriously consider offering its customers something that none of its competitors ever could: The prospect of going back to the future!
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
