Crazy Travel Agents

Dave and I went to London a few weeks back and had quite an adventure. Besides being a little nervous of the public transportation (which we did use a fair amount of) we had a couple crazy experiences with our tickets.

One of the women that Dave works with booked this weekend in London for her and her husband (who was suppose to arrive back from Iraq in July). At the end of June she asked Dave if we would be interested in their tickets because they decided to go back to the states instead of going to London. The tickets, so we were told, included the following: 2 nights at a nice hotel, 2 2-for-1 dinners at the hotel restaurant, and 2 tickets for 2 shows (Chicago and Phantom of the Opera). We jumped at the chance since we hadn't been to London yet and it was a good deal. We never would have booked something like this on our own, but thought it would be fun anyway.

From the experience we learned a couple of lessons that we would like to pass on:
1. If you book from a travel agent, make sure the tickets and itinerary are in English (unless of course you speak another language, like say German).
2. If the tickets are not in English make sure that you know exactly what you are getting.
3. Make sure that you have exactly one ticket for each item you are to receive.

This is what we ended up with:
1. 2 single beds, instead of a double bed.
2. The first dinner we had a kind of 2-for-1, as they didn't tell us that whether we get an appetizer or not we will be charged for one.
3. The second dinner they refused to give us 2-for-1 because we didn't have a ticket for another dinner. The ticket that we had used the night before of course was in German which no one understood.
4. Our tickets to Phantom did not note the theatre it was playing in, or the time, so we had to track down that information.

Lastly, you must just know that London is very expensive, and they charge to get into their churches (which I think is sacrilige). We ended up only going to their free exhibits- British Library, the British Museum and the National Gallery. I can recommend each of them highly, though my fav was the library. I am not sure how they got the Guttenburg Bible from the Germans, but it is cool to see.

Picture: in front of the British Museum