Doh!

In the autumn of 2024, when we were still a relatively new thing, over dinner at my place one night, Dirk, who’d been kinda longing to get back to Venice for the Biennale, after a long absence, suddenly asked if I wanted to go to Venice. My immediate reaction in my head was, “Yes, yes, yes, please get me away from here. It would be awesome to spend my early November birthday in Venice.” That is not what I said. Before he and I met, I had attempted to step down, after 12 years, from the board of the local theatre company only to be persuaded to stay on an extra year to help with the “transition”. (By “transition” I mean the period when the rest of the board figured out how to divide up and start doing all the things I had been doing.) And I’d already made a commitment to my friend Jean to be the prompter for the play she was directing. So, instead of saying, “Yes, yes, yes!” I said, “Wish I could.”

After France last year, it was going to be Italy this year. Venice and maybe somewhere in Tuscany. I started doing Italian on Duolingo. (After 275 days, I would be hard pressed to say anything in Italian beyond good morning and thank you – and I already knew how to say those. It seems Duolingo is useful as a reminder of things you already sort of knew – like my French, but not all that great for learning from scratch.) The original plan was the spring – May, just after this year’s Biennale opens. But Dirk ended up on the waiting list for shoulder surgery and the thought was perhaps we should hold off until after. But how long will the wait be?

So, rather later than we should have started planning, we’ve decided to go in May after all. Of course all the nice places I’d been looking at vaguely on AirBnB are now booked, so we’ll have to take what we can get. Before we do anything else we needed to sort dates and flights.

We want a week in London to start, so I can see (and introduce Dirk to) friends and aging relatives. So, we’re looking at either a multi-city booking with one airline or two separate bookings. A few days ago I started looking at British Airways, choosing, for no particular reason, May 14th as our departure date. Week in London, flight London to Venice, fortnight in Venice, then Venice-London-Vancouver all in one day on the way back.

Much to my amazement (and due to the crazy price of economy fares for all four flights), it was cheaper to fly over business class. Fantastic. A lot of money, but still…

Yesterday we decided, okay, let’s do it, let’s book it. We weren’t sure May 14th was the best departure date, so we looked at a few others. Yikes! Nearly twice as much. Okay, May 14th it would be.

Went through the whole process on the BA website, including seat selection (business for first flight, premium economy thereafter), got our total, clicked on Agree and Pay and nothing happened. Refreshed the page multiple times, it still didn’t move on. Finally rang BA, sat on hold for 15 minutes, only to be told by actual person that there was very high volume on the website at the moment due the number of people (I am paraphrasing here) trying to get the fuck out of the Middle East. He said he could book it for me over the phone. Gave him the flight numbers and other details. The price he quoted me was going to be double the price the website claimed we’d be paying for both of us. I told him to forget it and decided to start another online booking. Same flights, same seats, same price. Clicked on pay again and this time it went through. Filled in passenger information, provided credit card details, clicked confirm. A message came up saying these flights were no longer available and must have sold out since I began the booking. What the fuck? Was the cheapness of business class on that one particular flight a mistake that the bloke on the phone at BA had adjusted? Bastard.

Okay, this was crazy. Maybe we needed to give London a miss on this trip and just do two weeks in Venice. No direct flights from Vancouver to anywhere in Italy, but a number of airlines who fly to Venice with European connections. Checked Air France, KLM and Lufthansa. Latter was the cheapest, but all were still at least $1000 more than that May 14th BA booking that included London. Fuck.

By this time it was four in the afternoon and I was still in my dressing gown. This was driving me crazy. And then, quite literally late in the day, it suddenly occurred to me. I’d tried changing the departure date in May to various days, always with the twice as much result. What if I added one day to the return date? So I did. And guess what? After paying for seat selection, it was a few hundred dollars less than the original dates. And this time when I hit pay, the next thing I saw was “Congratulations, you’re going to London!”

Hurrah! Just wish I’d thought of changing the return date a bit earlier in the day. Oh, well.

Now to find places to stay.