Bureaucratic nonsense.

After eagerly booking my trips yesterday, I realized less than an hour later, that a very big very problematic mistake had been made.

Namely, one of my trips had been booked for the wrong day.

Let me elaborate.

The Citi ThankYou website is a terrible website. For one thing, when you select a date that you want to travel, and then select the tour that you want to buy, it for some reason thinks that its a good idea to change the date of your tour. To whatever the hell default date it thinks is right.

For the first three tours that I booked, I managed to catch this mistake. For the last tour I booked, I didn't. So, I had a tour booked for July 1st instead of the date that I was planning on doing it.

Being an assertive little human, I called Citi ThankYou's customer service right away. I spoke with a supremely unhelpful soul named Kevin who rambled at me that there was nothing he could do, that they would have to charge me to change the date, and that he will have to check with Viator (the tour provider) to have them make the switch.

I basically told him that no, sorry Kevin, you will NOT be charging me for the fact that your website is terrible, and that I better be hearing back from him soon to be resolving this.

I then hung up and called Viator, and spoke to a much more helpful CSA who told me that there was in fact nothing to be done at this moment, but since my trip is SIX MONTHS AWAY, he assured me that the tour date would be switched with no charge to me and no aggravation.

Three days later I called Citi ThankYou again and spoke to the delightful Pam, who profusely apologized for all of my troubles. She put yet another request in to Viator to get the date switched, and told me that she would call me in two days regardless of whether they got back yet or not just to keep my updated, and moreover that she would stay on the case until it got resolved.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Pam called back the very next day to tell me that the tour got switched no problem, my voucher is updated, and I'm all set. I only wish that she had called while I was home so I could have thanked her.

Moral of the day: Be assertive and don't give up.

SIDENOTE: Yes, these are my three favorite internet memes. I can't believe I fit them all in one blog post. Just sayin'.