Tuesday morning we awoke in our hotel room in Brussels. We took a 10-minute walk to Wittamer's, one of the classic old
chocolateries of Belgium, then back to the hotel, packed everything up, checked out, and walked the 15 minutes or so to the main train station. Caught a train to the Amsterdam airport: it was somewhat delayed by a national strike in Belgium, then by a slower train ahead of it on the same tracks, then by an infestation of swans on the tracks. (Would I make that up?) But we still got there at 13:30, in plenty of time for our 17:05 plane to JFK.
As of 16:30, they hadn't started boarding yet, and takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 17:25. Mechanics were looking into "a technical issue" with the plane, with no confident estimate of when they'd be finished. As of 17:45, takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 19:00. As of 18:30, the flight was cancelled altogether, we would be automatically rebooked onto a later flight, we would get an e-mail with details, and if we wanted a hotel voucher to spend the night, we should go to transfer desk T4. We heard about all of this by individual airline employees walking around and telling small groups of people, because the microphone they would have used to announce it more broadly wasn't working. So by the time we got the word about transfer desk T4, there had already been a mass exodus in the direction of transfer desk T4, and we found ourselves at the end of about a hundred-yard-long line inside the terminal.
It occurred to me that the rush for hotel vouchers might well be accompanied by a rush for hotel rooms, so while standing in the line, I pulled out my phone and looked for nearby hotels. Found one, the "Citizen M", a 5-minute walk away from the terminal we were in. This sounded good because we had no idea what time our rebooked flight would be, so I made a reservation there. And since KLM was allegedly paying for it, I requested breakfast with our room (for an extra 19 € each).
I checked my mail a few times for word of a rebooking, then tried text-chatting with customer service to rebook interactively. The bot informed me that my flight had been canceled (news flash!) and pointed me to the exact same web page I had used to chat with it, but also offered the option of talking to a human. So I waited for that.
After an hour and a bit, and before getting a response from the chat, I reached the front of the line for hotel vouchers. There was a ring of about eight self-service kiosks, which the employees recommended you start with, resorting to another line for human customer service only if the self-service kiosk couldn't cope with your request. So I did that: the kiosk recognized that our flight had been cancelled, and offered us food-and-drink vouchers and a hotel voucher. For the hotel voucher, there were two choices: make the reservation for me, or I'll make it myself. Since I had already reserved a room, I picked the latter, and was given two food-and-drink vouchers and a "generic voucher" that isn't actually good for anything itself; you're supposed to show it to the human customer-service agents after standing in another line. But in the process of doing all this, the kiosk also informed us that we had been rebooked for a 7:15 flight to London Heathrow and a connection at an unspecified time from there to JFK. So much for breakfast.
We stood in another line for twenty minutes or so before getting to the human customer-service agents, who took our "generic voucher" in exchange for a voucher at the Park Plaza hotel. I pointed out that I had already made a reservation at Citizen M, which the agent acknowledged was much closer -- "basically the only hotel in walking distance of here". The prepaid vouchers were apparently available only for the Park Plaza, but the agent assured me that we could get reimbursed for the cost of a night's lodging at another hotel, and gave me instead a card with URL's to request such reimbursement in various languages. And she also printed off our boarding passes for the flights to Heathrow and thence to JFK, telling us we should be at the terminal 90 minutes before boarding, i.e. 5:45. We thanked her and walked into the night looking for the hotel.
Which wasn't difficult: Google Maps gave reasonable walking directions, and we weren't far from the front door of the terminal before we could see a big letter-M logo glowing in the distance. Checked in and went to our room. Which was trippy and ultramodern: the first thing you see when you open the door is a shower stall on the "open plan", followed by a toilet, also on the "open plan", and once you've walked between them, you get to the bed. In fact, both shower stall and toilet have frosted-glass walls that close around them on a circular track, so they're not
entirely "open". Next to the bed is an iPad that controls everything in the rooom: the television, the curtains, the blinds, the lights, the soundscape, the night-light (which has separate controls for brightness and color)...
It was now about 9 PM and we hadn't eaten much since noon, so I looked up the menu on the iPad and discovered there was no room service. So
shalmestere and I agreed on some dim sum as a late-night snack, and I went back to the ground floor bar to order it. While waiting, I pulled out my phone and realized that a human had responded to my customer-service chat. I summarized the situation, and the agent said "Good news! You've been rebooked on the 8:00 AM flight from Brussels to Amsterdam, and the 10:00 AM flight from Amsterdam to JFK." This was the exact same pair of flights I'd been rebooked onto twice before, and it was decidedly
not appropriate now given that we were in Amsterdam, not Brussels. I pointed this out, and asked whether we could have just the 10:00 flight from Amsterdam to JFK, without the Brussels-AMS leg (which sounded more pleasant than a 7:15 flight changing in London). The agent misunderstood me and said the 10:00 PM flight was cancelled too (I didn't think there even
was a 10:00 PM flight!); when I clarified that I meant 10:00 AM the next day, the agent said that flight was also canceled or unavailable or something. So we agreed to stick to the 7:15-to-London plan. And finally the food arrived, I took it up to the room, we ate and fell into bed.
Wednesday morning I woke to my alarm at 4:30 AM. Turned on the night-light in orange-yellow to suggest sunrise, took a shower, and woke
shalmestere to do the same. We got downstairs by 5:30, checked out (accepting the offer of a couple of
pains au chocolat to-go, since we had paid for breakfast after all), walked back to the terminal, and went through security and passport-control again. The 7:15 flight to London boarded without mishap, although it didn't actually get off the ground until 8:00. Landed in London only ten minutes late, with about 45 minutes before our connection to New York would start boarding. Unfortunately, the connection to New York was on a different airline and from a different terminal, so we had to stand in line to catch a bus from one terminal to another. Fortunately, the bus stayed on the "inside-security-and-passport-control" side of the border, so we didn't have to do security and passport control again in the new terminal. Unfortunately, the boarding passes we had used for the flight to London were apparently insufficient to get us onto the NYC leg, so we had to stand in another line, with dozens of other people, to talk to one of the two Virgin Atlantic customer-service agents on duty at 9 AM. Eventually the agent issued us two new boarding passes, and we started running to find our gate, hoping it wouldn't be closed by the time we got there. And it wasn't, although the plane was mostly boarded.
Fairly uneventful flight from Heathrow to JFK. Retrieved bags, didn't even have to show passports to anyone (just get our digital photos taken), caught a cab home, and collapsed in bed, 32 hours after boarding the train from Brussels to Amsterdam.