You know that upcoming trip to Scotland I was talking about in my last post? It was with Zoom, the airline that went bankrupt yesterday.

What I didn’t say in my last post, is that we also have tickets (with another airline), going from Scotland to Sweden, paid and non-refundable. Accommodation and train passes in Sweden, paid and non-refundable. So not only do we lose our tickets to Scotland, but unless we buy another pair of tickets to Scotland at this late (and therefore expensive) hour, we lose the rest of the trip as well.

It’s okay, I said, I have a free ticket with Air Canada, I said. A quick call to Air Canada allowed me to find out that my free ticket would cost me over 600$ in of fuel surcharges and other fees. Jonathan, who had fewer points, would have to pay 1100$ for his reward ticket.

Zoom executives said they were “desperately sorry” for the inconvenience.

Last night I tossed and turned, desperately sorry that Jonathan was going to miss his best friend’s wedding, and miss seeing the family he hasn’t seen in a year, while he wrote our miserable apologies to his parents and the fiancés. It was a miserable night and morning as we scrambled and racked our brains for a way we could afford a new pair of tickets, but kept finding we just couldn’t.

This morning, however, I found out that American Express will be refunding all card members who booked Zoom tickets and now cannot use them, even if they aren’t stranded, even if they don’t have the AmEx travel insurance, even if AmEx never recoups the expense from Zoom in their turn. I called and spoke to several CSRs, including managers, to ask over and over again if they were SURE we would be refunded, and had it spelled out to me in 14 different ways that we would be.

AmEx, je t’aime.

And so it looks like I have to finish my dress after all.