Luckily, my return-to-mainland flight this Thursday is on ATA.
Well, that's what I thought on Tuesday, April Fool's day, but the joke was on me.
I wandered down to the condo office to pick up a newpaper Thursday morning an hour or so before departing airport for my Maui to Oakland non-stop. The ticker on the TV said "ATA filed for bankruptcy". OK, I've flown on a lot of airlines that have been in and out of chapter 11, no biggie. Then the next thing that crawled across the bottom of the screen was "ATA shut down". Oops!
My condo was already booked for that evening, but the property manager offered me another place, and a neighbor offered a place for us to stay, but since we had all doctor and dentist appointments setup for this week, along with some contractors coming in to do some work, I decided to go ahead and look for a return flight as soon as possible.
The flights back to the mainland were already pretty well booked up because of the Aloha shutdown, and my options were disappearing right in front of my eyes as I hit the various websites and checked on flights.
Finally I booked a United flight from Honolulu to SFO on Saturday morning, then went up and told my wife that she was going to have a 2 day vacation in Honolulu on the way back to California.
It worked out pretty well, all considering. We had been thinking about hopping the superferry over to Honolulu for a night or two, but never did it because of houseguests and the extra time the superferry spent in drydock. So we got to see how Waikiki had changed over the last 6 or 7 years since we had been there, caught the Magic of Polynesia show, and wandered around downtown checking out the state capitol, Iolani Palace and Aloha Tower. Sure beat hanging out at the airport for hours and end or catching a red-eye back to the mainland.
Since Hawaiian had changed to a 767 in place of a 737 for some of their interisland flights, the Maui to Honolulu hop was easy. $55 walk-up fare, with a departure within an hour.
Charlie Allen
p.s. The "distressed traveler" rate at the Outrigger Reef on the Beach is a bit cheaper than the kamaaina rate.
