BonnieGibbons.com

So you're going on vacation! You've spent hours on flight search engines and build-a-vacation sites, carefully weighing price against convenience, agonizing over whether to take a round trip to the city with direct flights from your home base, or go for an open jaw trip (fly into one city, depart from another) that will save you the expense and hassle of traveling back to the arrival city -- but may involve stopovers and inconvenient scheduling.

Imagine going to all this trouble only to discover from your ticket agent at check-in that the "direct" flight you found and booked actually includes a stopover. Imagine the chagrin, considering that you've been consoling yourself all morning that, hey, you may be dragging yourself miserably out of bed at 5:00 AM, but at least it's a direct flight.

Take a look at this itinerary, representing the wonderful trip to Spain that John and I just finished yesterday. What would a normal person conclude about the flight schedule?

Doesn't this look like a 1-stop departure from Chicago to Granada (via Madrid), followed ten days later by a direct flight from Barcelona to Chicago? This is how it looked when I was selecting flights on my build-a-vacation site of choice, EuropeanDestinations.com, and to the best of my recollection I accepted an uncomfortably early departure in exchange for what I thought would be a direct flight.

With difficulty, you can see "Stops: 1" at the bottom of the screen shot. But the location of the stop is a secret. More importantly, the departure itinerary establishes the precedent of listing each leg individually. I wonder how many passengers will zoom in on the fine print and wonder where the plane will stop -- I know that none of the English-speaking passengers checking in with us had done so. All were shocked and disappointed to hear the ticket guy apologetically mention Madrid. For his part, this young man shrugged his shoulders apologetically and said "happens all the time."

John and I live in the Chicago area and tend to spend our big vacations in Europe, so direct flights really do make a difference. On the way to Europe, a long layover or missed connection due to weather problems, etc. can "steal" a day of your vacation. It makes it unwise to schedule activities and performances on the evening of your arrival, though that's sometimes unavoidable. A stopover on the way home is less risky, but far more exhausting. As we squeezed ourselves in airline steerage seats for the third time yesterday, John commented that he was glad the secret Madrid stopover came as a last-minute surprise, because he'd been enjoying the thought of a direct flight home for the entire trip. Along with a preference for Midway departures over O'Hare, direct flights are a factor for which we are willing to pay a little extra.

Insult Added to Injury

We quickly got over our disappointment and took the BCN-MAD leg without incident, and what turned out to be a three-hour layover allowed plenty of time for the bewilderingly unnecessary passport control between two Spanish cities -- I know Barcelona is in the autonomous region of Catalonia, but come on! It also allowed plenty of time for the several-kilometer journey to the new gate.

In fact, there were no problems at all, until (moments after being sternly ordered to get into our seats ASAP so we could get TF outta there) the pilot announced the first of many ten-minute delays due to a technical problem. At least we were only stuck on the tarmac for two hours. And in the terminal for another two hours. We ended up leaving Spanish airspace about 12 hours after our stressful, pre-dawn wake-up call, and our time in transit stretched to 21 hours, counting our foolish decision to travel home from O'Hare on public transportation rather than blowing $31 on a cab ride.

It would be unfair to blame this miserable trip home entirely on Iberia's hidden stopover, since the same thing could have happened to a BCN-ORD flight. As unfair as hiding a stopover in the fine print?