[PHXFlyer]

Originally Posted by jw50mayo

My son and I purchased two tickets through priceline.com to attend a film festival in San Antonio, Texas.

Duplicated a R/T purchase on Priceline.com with a one-week advance purchase. After selecting the outbound and return flight options I was shown this:

Add Trip Protection - Get 24-hour protection for your trip!


For only $16 per person (plus $1 per day if you include a rental car*), U.S. residents can purchase protection against unforeseen illness, injury, baggage loss, and more. Details.

Trip Protection includes:
Trip Cancellation and Trip Interruption (reimbursement up to the full cost of your trip)
Medical Expenses (up to $1500) and Emergency Evacuation (up to $50,000)
Travel Accident Protection (up to $50,000)
Baggage Protection (up to $500 for stolen, lost or damaged bags and personal effects)
24 Hour Worldwide Assistance Services

Yes! I'd like to purchase Trip Protection for only $16 per person (plus $1 per day if you include a rental car).
No, thanks. I prefer to decline Trip Protection.

Did you elect to insure your travel with this inexpensive option?

We purchased the tickets on December 30th and were set to fly from SeaTac airport on January 7th, at 11:40 am. We picked the flight that had the best arrival time in San Antonio and that ended up being American Airlines. We live near Yakima, Washington and had planned to travel over the pass early on the morning of the 7th.

I also searched a R/T one-week advance purchase from Yakima (YKM) to San Antionio (SAT) and the whole ticket priced at about $150 more per person. Seems like a lot but in hindsight would probably have been a better option than driving from YKM to SEA. I'm sure parking @YKM is cheaper too.

We knew we couldn’t make the 3:30 flight driving so we decided to take an around about route to try to make the 11:55 pm flight. That involved heading south over Satus pass then west to Portland and then up I-5 to Seattle. Unfortunately, I-5 ended up closing because of flooding. So we had to turn around with no way to make it to SeaTac airport. At that point I called American Airlines to see if they could change my flight to fly out of Portland. They said they could, but it would be the next morning and there would be fees of $750 per ticket.

The I-5 closure was well publicized in the media. Alaska Airlines (Horizon Air to be exact) lowered their walk-up fare to $179 O/W in reaction to this. I'm sure you could have gotten a lower return fare depending on the length of your stay in SAT. If not, $179 X 4 (2 ppl. ea. way) comes out to $716 which is less than half the $750 X 2 AA wanted to change your tickets.