You know you’ve had an “interesting” flight when...

you get an apologetic email from the airline after you’ve landed. 

It all started at check-in.

After planning this trip for over six months and saving our airline miles for years, I’d checked and rechecked our flight details. . The weather forecast was great in both Chicago and Brussels. Our check-in went smoothly until I glanced at our boarding passes and noticed our seat assignments had changed. I’d just looked at them in the morning on-line.

No one seemed to know why they were different. Yes, we were still on a Boeing 777. Once on airport Wi-Fi, I looked at our current flight seat map and realized there had been equipment change. The fantastic lie-back Business Class seats…gone.  Instead, the old seats from years ago.

The boarding area was chaotic as many people seemed to have no idea how and why their seats had changed. The confusion in the cabin continued and we took off about 40 minutes late because of it.

The flight attendants bore the brunt of the change. The airplane had been provisioned for the original configuration, so they were short on some meals. We heard storms in the Far East were to blame for the change. Our flight attendant told us there were only two planes in the entire fleet still not reconfigured – this was one of them. Our promised 150 channels of entertainment weren’t available, but economy had it worse: the AV wasn’t working at all.

 To their credit, the crew supplied superior and friendly service, apologizing for every inconvenience. The food that was available was very good, and the beverage service fantastic.

We arrived on time and the weather was beautiful, as forecast. As we deplaned, our Belgian flight attendant said, “Maybe I will see you on your flight home.”

I told her that would be nice, but better on a different plane.