kareina

Today I got the email that my abstract has been accepted, I will be doing a talk on Thursday 10 January, at the GeoArchaeology session of the 36th Nordic Geological Winter Meeting.Therefore I have just spent way too many hours booking travel, the SCA event, and the conference. Conferences are REALLY expensive (like more than the cost of flying there if I hadn't added on the other flights). Booking flights is really unpleasant, and expensive, and kinda stressy when the cost goes up while you are in the middle of the process. Luckily, I will have forgotten all of the stressy bits of today's booking/paying by the time of the trip, so hopefully, I will just enjoy it.

Not looking forward to adding up what the flight really cost though. Because my sister just had a very good experience with booking via GoogleFlights, I gave it a try. Can not recommend. In my case it was stressful, in that as I looked at options, the price increased in real time. Eventually I found an itinerary that should work, and wouldn't cost more than the cost of driving to Crown last spring (which isn't an option in January, due to the whole "studded tires are illegal in Germany" thing--it was one thing to drive to Denmark in the spring, change to summer tires, and keep going knowing that it was basically summer from there south. I am not going to do that in January, when it actually could be winter when we get there). However, since I had three legs of the journey, on three different days, while GoogleFlights treated it as a single package while it was showing it to me, with a single price for the trip, when I pushed the "I will take it" button, suddenly it broke it down to three different tickets, that had to be paid for separately.

So I paid for the first one, clicked on the second, filled in the passenger details, pressed the pay button, and it did... nothing. pressed it again... nothing. Looked closer--way up at the top of the screen it said "congratulations on finding flights at great prices, there are zero seats available".

Went back to the googleflights screen, pressed the button to pay for that set again, and it brought me back to "zero seats available".

So I paid for the third ticket, then went back to googleflights, and this time asked for just a one way trip on that day for those flights, and got an itinerary with the same start and end times, and pressed the button to say "yes, I will take it" to the lowest priced alternative. At which point it took me to another web page, where I filled in the travel details for the passengers, said I wanted to pay, wound up at a payment page, noticed the price was now about 1/10th of what it should be, just as the payment was accepted, and then I got a "congratulations, you have now locked in the price, an email will be sent with details" screen. No such email appeared instantly, so I pressed the browser back button, got to the flight, went to buy, and the price was now just over 9,000 sek, instead of the 7,000 something I had remembered seeing not long before. So I un-clicked the button for "let the company solve the problem if my flights get delayed, and the price went down to under 8,000 again, and I paid.

Then the email about the locked price arrived, and it said I need to pay 6000-something. I am not clear if I had misremembered the price, or if what I had paid was a deposit, but either way, I have now paid more than I should have. I have sent their customer service a note explaining that I understand it is my fault for not understanding the web page (probably as the person designed it intended I shouldn't), and can they please apply that extra money to the cost of that insurance (that I had had to refuse because it cost too much) for the flights?

I am not holding my breath on that, but one can ask, and one feels like one is doing something to try to solve the problem

I don't even want to talk about the cost of the conference! However, since this appears to be me bitching, I will anyway. The weekend's SCA event, including all food and beds, is €85 (or at this moment's rates 971.08 SEK). The conference Student price, if you are a member of the Geologiska Föreningen, is 3,100 SEK. That includes lunch and snacks, but no place to stay, and none of the extras, like tshirt, conference dinner, and Ice-Breaker (none of which I wanted anyway). However, when I went to pay that (after first renewing my membership with the Geologiska Föreningen, which costs 150 SEK for students, and which means I didn't have to pay the student-non member fee of 3600 SEK, so totally worth it), the total bill came to 3875 SEK!!!!! I thought I must have pressed a wrong button somewhere and accidentally asked for one of the extras, so I canceled the payment, and went back to the beginning of the form and did it all again. Nope, I did it perfect. The price shows ad 3,100 for most of the process. It is only when you go to pay that it suddenly tells you about the 775 in taxes that were not included in the original price. So the taxes I am paying for the conference approaches the total cost of Coronation.

At least I know that I don't hold on to stress, so as soon as I finish posting this, updating my financial records (and learning the total damages for today) and go do something else for a bit I will quickly forget, and, unless I happen to read this entry again, I won't remember what a stressy morning this all was.

And, perhaps, if I am lucky, the application I sent in for help with attending the conference will be approved, and I will get a little of this back. They do their decisions on the first 10 days of each month, so perhaps by my birthday I will get some good news from them.