Jaunted

It was the score of this budget traveler’s lifetime—at least, until Jeff and I actually tried to book a specific flight before the expiration date. Apparently, the code on our tickets (“U” for undesirable, it seemed) meant we weren’t eligible to fly to any of the countries we wanted on any of the dates that we’d chosen, no matter how flexible we tried to be. Our four golden tickets, it seemed, were rapidly turning into useless scraps of paper.

A few trips to the Avianca office in midtown Manhattan and several customer service phone calls later, I finally learned a key piece of info that eventually salvaged our vacation.

When requested to do so, Avianca will allow you to “cash in” an international voucher (face value: $600) and apply those dollars towards the purchase of a ticket on any flight you’d like. With $2,400 in Avianca dollars to play with, Jeff and I easily booked a Friday night red-eye to Cartagena, Colombia—our dream destination—with a Sunday morning return just over a week later. We still had to pay the taxes, which amounted to $250 on a $700 ticket, but figured it was vale la pena, or worth the trouble, to return to South America.

Unlike last year’s near-miss departure on our Avianca flight to Quito, Jeff and I encountered absolutely no line at JFK for our 11:55pm flight, and virtually no wait at security. We were only mildly put out that we’d been separated—they'd put us into two middle seats across the aisle from each other. It was only after boarded the plane that we realized our tenth-row seats were in front of an emergency exit row, which meant we’d have to sit ramrod straight for the six hour overnight flight.

Since sleep wasn’t an option, I ended up amusing myself with a selection of first-run TV dramas, music and games on the touch screen TV built into the seat in front of me. I finally gotten past the $32,000 level on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" (the British edition, so it contained endless questions about spotted dick, long-dead royals and tiny hamlets I’d never heard of) when we started our descent into Bogota. During the one-hour connecting flight to Cartagena, Jeff and I sat together, and happily reclined two inches—a small distance, but to two weary travelers, it made all the difference in the world.

Insider Tip for Flying Avianca: Do NOT read the new Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers while on vacation, as we did! While an excellent read, it contains an entire chapter about plane flights that, um, didn’t end well. The textbook screw up: A 1990 flight from Colombia to New York—on Avianca.

Related Stories:
· Jaunted in Ecuador [Jaunted]
· Jaunted Field Trips [Jaunted]
· Medellin the Film [Official Website]
· Romancing the Stone [IMDB]