Part way thru my packing I noticed something disturbing on the TV. M.I.5 and Scotland Yard had just arrested 21 terrorists who had been planning to blow up some planes going from London to the US. Hurray for Scotland Yard, boo for the terrorists. This did not bode well. Not so much for me, as I operate under the general assumption that I am both the luckiest and the most loved person in the universe, so I simply don’t have to worry about this sort of thing, but Beci has yet to buy into either half of my belief system, and people with bombs generally tend to bother her.

The obvious solution to this situation is to simply not tell Beci that there is any hint of a problem in London. I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, right?

Obviously.

And my plan went well until bed time when she decided that a bit of TV would help her drift off. My suggestion that the Simpsons would be the perfect sleep draught was met with bad news: "I think CNN would be better". And there, splashed all over CNN were very smart looking bobbies mixed in with the more serious anti-terror guys pouring over various buildings, tons of smashing British accents, and the news that I had wisely hidden from Beci for most of the night. So much for my twisted logic. I left everything to the hands of fate and went to sleep at midnight, just 5 hours before we needed to leave for the airport.

At 1:30 AM I woke up to the local side of a phone conversation:

"Did you know that Heathrow is mostly shut down? …. Well it is. … Only if you absolutely have to travel … CNN says they may completely halt all air traffic … Thank you."

I must have looked confused.

"That was Disney. I was just telling them about the arrests in London. They’re looking into it".

I know exactly what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing. Just how powerful is this wife of mine that she can get Disney to investigate complex political events in other countries for her. My second thought was how on earth did she get in touch with anybody at Disney at 1:30 AM!

It turns out that the cool little Adventures by Disney ticket booklet that they gave us had an emergency contact number in the back. Beci called, and they answered. And they did start to investigate what was happening in London. Several conversations and several different and very helpful people later we were informed that the tour was at the very least going to be compressed by one day and most likely canceled entirely as it didn’t look like anybody would be able to get from the US to London. They would know more in two hours Two hours was an hour too long for us, as we would be well into the boarding process by the time they had an answer for us.

"Not a problem", we were told. "Under the circumstances we will happily allow you to reschedule."

Mind you, this is early morning on our day of departure.

At 6:00, as promised, Disney called us back yet again to let us know that the tour would continue, but with the first day trimmed back (not a serious loss, as check-in and the welcome dinner are the only things scheduled for the first day). But for us, and anybody else on the west coast, it probably wouldn’t be possible to make the connections on the east coast and get to London in anything short of two days, so we would be rescheduling. They told us what they had available, we picked a date, and that was it. They were outstanding. Disney is usually pretty good at this sort of thing, but even compared to their best, this was some remarkable customer service.

Now, to top it all off, we had DVC reservations at the Hotel New York at Disneyland Paris for the two days following our tour. Anybody with DVC knows that flexibility is not part of their mantra. We needed to change our DVC booking just 9 days before we were due to arrive. My expectations were low when I called in and pressed ‘3′ about 17 times to get thru their automated menu system.

The agent who answered calmly listened to my long and winding explanation of why I needed to move my reservation. There was a moment of silence on the other end as she likely weighed the odds that this was all a bad joke being played on her by her supervisor. My low expectations dropped even lower (DVC Reservations are the only place where I’m not the luckiest and most well loved person in the world).

"May I have your member number and the name of the person you’ve been working with over at Adventures, please?"

And then I was put on hold for about 10 minutes before she came back and asked me for a number where she could call me back as this was taking longer than she had expected. 30 minutes later she called me back, thanked me for my patience, and said "You’re all set. We’ll send you a new confirmation letter. Have fun in Paris".

What could have been a total disaster, fixing different reservations with different groups in the Disney travel empire, turned out to be one of the easiest fixes you could imagine.

And then I got in my car and drove to work.

Beci and I will let you know how Adventures by Disney rolls in a few weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Adventures by Disney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.