My First Travel Failure
--
aka why you shouldn’t book through Orbitz ever again.
If you follow me on Instagram you would have seen that I had a tripped planned for Bangkok with a flight leaving in 11 days. Yes, less than two weeks from today.
I booked said trip via Orbitz, it was my first time booking through them and it will certainly be the last. I’ll give you a short recap of what happened:
- Orbitz overlaps our flight from Bejing To Bangkok. AKA our flight to Bangkok leaves before our flight to Bejing lands.
- We find the mistake and call them to fix our travel times.
- They give us a new set of flights that adds one day of travel to our itinerary (for a total of three days to get from Boston To Bangkok), gives us one hour inbetween our connection from Boston-Bejing to Bejing to Bangkok, AND gets us into Bangkok at 11:45 pm at night.
- We initially take the flight and then realize that we now need to get a hotel because of our additional day of travel, the chances of us missing our flight to Bangkok is pretty damn high, and we will be maneuvering our way through a new country at 12 am at night.
- We call customer service back and ask for a refund. They initially tell us that because the flight has already gone through that they can’t give us one BUT by staying assertive but extremely polite and appreciative our customer service rep gets on the phone with Air China ANDDDD GETS US OUR MONEY BACK!
All of this took a sum total of 6+ hours on the phone with their customer service.
Yes, I just said six hours.
So we took a serious hit. Luckily we had been totally slacking on planning our travels within Thailand so we haven’t had to cancel any extra flights or Airbnb’s.
There’s a serious lesson to be learned here though (besides not booking an international flight with Orbitz).
Life is all about rolling with the punches.
There’s two choices in this situation:
- To be angry that it happened
OR
2. To go with the flow
In life, when things don’t go to plan we resist the new changes.
Our egoic expectations tell us that we should be mad that these changes are happening to us. We’re automatically angry that things aren’t going the way we initially intended them to.
When we let go of that expectation and decide to go with the flow and to NOT resist this change and instead embrace it-that’s where the magic happens.
By embracing change and not fighting it, we open ourselves up to the real potential of life.
We see opportunity where we once saw a closed door.
If we can make the concious decision to embrace these changes instead of fighting them-life becomes obvious.
It becomes obvious that somethings just weren’t meant to be (like said Bangkok trip).
To go with the flow in situations like these and other situations where life didn’t go as planned is a hell of a lot easier said than done.
But it can be done.
All it takes is ONE concious decision to see a change in plans (big or small) as an opportunity. An opportunity for the unknown, an opportunity for life to create something special, and opportunity for something to happen that you may not have realized you even needed.
I’ve had only travel success since 2017 started, going to Vegas, Colorado, and Chicago all on a whim.
Now that I’ve been hit with this failure-I honestly feel just as blessed as I did when I was having all of those successes.
My mentality is that I’m excited to see what life will fill this time void with. I’m excited to see where I’ll be in two weeks, even if it means I end up staying home and working in Nashville (if you don’t know-I love what I do and the thought of that actually EXCITES me).
Don’t let opportunity disguise itself as failure.
Embrace change.
Embrace change so tightly that life has no other choice BUT to provide you with an epic opportunity.
Embrace change so full heartedly that you no longer recognize situations as failures but just a chance for a plot twist.
Embrace change and in turn-you’ll have found the secret to living a happy and successful.
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