Our friend Phuc, who toured Asia with his wife Ashley after college, warned us on Saturday night to expect things to go wrong during our trip. Little did we know how quickly his prophecy would be realized. Earlier this week, we discovered that Singapore Airlines has summarily discontinued service between Dubai and Cairo, leaving us with a fairly glaring hole in our travel plans. Vik watched ruefully as his delicate, 38,993-mile itinerary collapsed like a house of cards.The United remedies -- being rerouted through Frankfurt, extending a 4-hour journey by 14 hours and screwing up our subsequent travel plans or skipping Dubai entirely and missing out on the chance to see Vik’s cousin Manisha and her family – were equally unpalatable so we called Singapore Air directly to get us from Dubai to Cairo more expeditiously. Given Singapore’s exemplary reputation and our business class ticket, we figured the odds were with us. Not so much. After spending 20 hours on hold and being blown off by customer service reps both in the U.S. and Singapore, we were back to square one.
So, to make a long story short, Singapore Airlines left us in the lurch and didn’t even try to make amends. So now, we’re forced to skip Dubai. We’re not going to get let this put a damper on our trip, but Vik has a long memory. Let’s hope he doesn’t get his hands on the contact info for the Singapore CEO (wasn’t he dating Jessica Biel before Timberlake?).
