Experience Washington. Long weekend in the capital.

To start in the beginning I have to tell that everything started with Delta breaking my luggage last year in November. Since I had all the time in the world to spend in JFK (read: 7 hours), I walked with my broken luggage from the belt straight into Delta's office, where a not the sharpest pen in the box took an hour to inspect my luggage and enter the case into computer. One of the biggest confusions was my phone number, where she tried to add +1 before +372 and Estonia that she tried to replace with Finland. Anyway, an hour later I had kind of taped my bag, gotten my case number and left to the next terminal. Few weeks later and I hadn't heard a word from Delta. Sent them an email asking how the investigation is going. Got the reply that due to the high volume or letters and other complaints they will get in touch with me at the earliest opportunity, but the opportunity might present itself in 30 business days. I just hoped that they do business on weekends too... Anyway, soon after I sent them another email. Got a similar reply. And a week later found a customer satisfaction survey from KLM, who belongs to the same group as Delta, where they wanted to find out how satisfied I was with how Delta solved my case. Since I didn't see anything remotely close to solution, I set everything to zero and expressed all the frustration created by Delta and KLM by that time. And in no time, just couple of days later, Air France (also same group as Delta and KLM) touched grounds with me to ask, what exactly went wrong.

Next few weeks there was frequent emailing with Delta (who admitted their fault and promised to refund the cost of the bag), with Air France (instead of emailing they tried to call me usually at 3am to follow it up with an email in the morning, where they expressed their great sorrow of not being able to contact me via phone) and with KLM (who asked pictures of the broken bag, at least two expert opinions that it's not worth to repair the bag and proof of purchase). Give it another few weeks and already there was the money from Delta on my account to buy a new bag and I also got an email from them that to compensate all the inconveniences they put me through they give me 400 dollar worth of travel credit. Same time KLM still asked for recovery value of the bag and expert opinions... And Air France kept calling me at night.

Coming back to this September, Scott and me took a look at the calendar and realised that we need to use those 400 dollars sooner rather than later. Since there was some credit left from another flight, we booked the long weekend in the capital. Should someone now think that it was as easy as going to their web page, choosing a flight, enter your voucher code and print the tickets... Well, not how it happened. To get those tickets, there were lots of minutes spent on the phone and even more of Scott's nerve cells, but we got those two tickets for 580 dollars, without paying more than those mentioned nerve cells and today afternoon we packed our bags and off we went to the capital.