May 15-17, 2025
How we ended up going to Germany this year is a long story that I will tell in a future post, but it has to do with the murder of my grandfather by the Nazis in 1940 and a diligent researcher and writer who cleared up several mysteries, fleshed out my grandfather's past and made him real for the first time for my siblings and me, and arranged to have him honored with a stolperstein. It is a great story.
But all that will come later. For now, suffice it say that my four siblings and I, four of our spouses, one of my nephews, and one of our cousins all converged in the small village of Giengen, our mother's birthplace, on May 20 for a five-day emotional journey into our family's past. Before I get to that, I want to cover several days that we spent traveling in eastern Germany with my sister Chris and her husband Stan.
So back to the very beginning of this trip, which didn't start out well. Prepare yourself for lots of complaining and very few photos. I want to make sure I have a record of what happened, and this blog is where I keep those kinds of records.
We were booked on a Lufthansa flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt (where we planned to meet up with my sister Chris and brother-in-law Stan) followed by a connecting flight from Frankfurt to Dresden, where we had a rental car reserved. Our initial flight was delayed almost 2.5 hours, which caused us to miss our connecting flight. Delayed flights happen all the time, but what compounded the frrustration was that when we realized we would likely miss the connecting flight, we first tried to work with customer service via phone to book a new connection fliight. After the FULL HOUR it took us to get to the right person, we were told there were no later connecting flights, even though we could see one online that said it had four seats available. They told us we would have to take a flight the next morning, which was unacceptable because of a tour we had booked and paid for in Dresden that was happening prior to the flight they were telling us to book would arrive.
The agent finally told us to talk to the people at the desk. When we did that, we were told there were seven or eight connecting flights, all with available seating, that could get us to Dresden on the same day as our original flight, but they would not book one for us because they felt there was a chance we would make the original flight. Believing we had many options once we arrived in Frankfurt, we felt better about the situation and stopped trying to book a new connecting flight.
Our flight arrived in Frankfurt about 15 minutes before the connecting flight to Dresden was due to leave. No one was available to direct us to the connecting flight--we were totally on our own. Of course, it was in a different terminal and we had to go through passport control and security since we had just entered the EU. Chris and Stan had arrived earlier and were sitting on the plane to Dresden, updating us on its status. It was running a bit late, and we ran through the airport, but the plane had pulled away from the gate by the time we got there.
We next went to the Lufthansa Customer Service desk, which of course was in another part of the aiport. There were only two agents working, and we waited for almost an hour before our turn came up. The agent said there were no flights that could get us to Dresden until one that left at 9:00 the following morning. We could only surmise that the agent at LAX had lied to us to get us off his back. Based on a tour we had scheduled in Dresden (and paid 600 euro for) and a pre-paid hotel room that was too late to cancel, and because my sister and brother-in-law were already in Dresden and relying on us for transportation and connection to the tour, that was unacceptable. The agent agreed that our best option if we had to get to Dresden by morning was to drive there.
We went to the Sixt desk in the car rental area. They said they were able to cancel our Sixt car reservation in Dresden and rented us a car in Frankfurt and even gave us a nice upgrade for close to what we would have paid in Dresden. So nice! We picked up a car from them and drove for about six hours to get to Dresden that night, already jet-lagged from the long flight, arriving at our hotel at 1:30 AM. The tank of gas it took us to get there cost an additonal 90 euro, but we thought it was worth it. However, when we got home to California after the trip, we discovered that the other car reservation had in fact NOT been cancelled after all ,and we were charged for both rentals. Of course, Sixt blamed Travelocity and Travelocity blamed Sixt and Bob could never get through to anyone who could help him resolve the issue.
We got on the road at about 7:00 PM. Luckily there was still some light, and we were able to enjoy the beautiful scenery of rural Germany for an hour or two.
About halfway through the drive when we were desperate for a bathroom stop, the Golden Arches never looked so good.
Another stop at a gas station yielded more treats. I passed up the Schnitzel Box Texas Style in favor of a Magnum Classic. Wise choice, I think.
That gas station, by the say, had the most innovative toilet seat cleaning system I've ever seen. See a short video here.
Sometime during the manic drive through the night to Dresden, we got an email and a text from Lufthansa informing us that we had been rebooked on the 9:00 AM flight from Frankfurt to Dresden the next day, but as we had worked out our driving plan with the Lufthansa customer service agent, we didn't worry about that. Imagine our surprise when the next day we were notified that our return flight from Frankfurt to Los Angeles in 9 days had been cancelled since we didn't make the flight from Frankfurt to Dresden. That customer service agent who helped us in Frankfurt and suggested that we DRIVE to Dresden did not tell us that our return flight to Los Angeles might get cancelled if we skipped out on the connecting flight. It took another 1.5 hours on the phone to resolve that issue. First we called Lufthansa, who told us to talk to Travelocity, who told us to talk to Lufthanbsa. A Lufthansa agent was finally able to reinstate our flight home, but only after we spent far too much of our precious time on the phone.
We are frequent international travelers, and this experience ranks as one of the worst we have had with an international flight. We understand the flights are sometimes unavoidably delayed, but overall, we were left without clear guidance, faced long waiting times, and encountered unhelpful and untruthful staff. I wrote a detailed letter of complaint to Lufthansa, expecting at least some frequent flier miles and perhaps even a flight voucher, but they brushed off my complaints without acknowledging any culpability on their end. I wrote a second letter, which garnered a curt reply. It's the most dismissive response I have ever had to a letter of complaint.
We really expected better from Lufthansa.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the rest of the trip was AMAZING, but this experience did leave us with less than loving feelings for both Lufthansa, Sixt, and Travelocity. We will be doing our best to avoid all three in the future.
