The Boarding Blunder Before Barcelona

Hi Everyone,

This is my first time doing a blog, and I'm really excited to be updating you all on my travels.  So this morning at about 9 am Barcelona time, I landed in Barca after a nightmarish ordeal the night before.  So what happened was, I had had a connection in Newark but had not been assigned a seat for the connecting flight to Barcelona.  I didn't think much of it, as I figured I would just be assigned one at the gate before boarding.

Little did I know that Continental Airlines had oversold the plane by at least 5 seats, one of those seats being mine.  As panic and stress started to settle in with the thought I may not get on this flight, I patiently had to wait 45 minutes in line for the ticket agent to arrive at the gate.  I had been overhearing rumors that there might be 3 extra seats on the flight and as I was the second person in line at the ticket counter, in front of other students who didn't have seats, I was feeling a little better.

After the ticket agent arrived to the gate 45 mins later than we were told she would be, she said all she could do was to take our boarding passes and would call us if people would volunteer to give up their seats.  Now realizing I was at the mercy of other people, I slowly started to freak out more and more.  Seeing as my flight was 90% made up of college students studying abroad, I thought the chances of 5 people giving up their seats seemed impossible.

Meanwhile, the other CEA students and I who lost their seats were frantically trying to figure out if there were other flights available, and the ticket agent notified us that the next flight to Barcelona wasn't until 7:10 pm the next day.  We students became very frustrated at this as we were told by CEA that we had to arrive in Barcelona in the midmorning if we wanted transportation to our hotels.  Soon a Continental Airlines supervisor was called and he let us know that there were seats on a flight that connected in Lisbon, Portugal that would have us arrive in BCN at 4:30 pm.  To make a very long story short, as I was preparing to have to accept the fact I would probably have to fly to Lisbon, Portugal, the ticket agent started calling off names of the students and hands me a boarding pass for my original flight to Barcelona.

I wanted to post this first anecdote of my trip because for those who know me, I am a worrywart when things aren't in my control.  Dealing with this issue on my own, and not getting overly dramatic or frantic, was the first example of how the experience of traveling abroad makes one learn things about themselves they hadn't prior to the trip.