A New Adventure

Last November my wife Lydia and I celebrated our  40th wedding anniversary; so we decided to treat ourselves to a once in a lifetime trip to Europe. Planning and executing this excursion has been a learning experience and an ordeal in itself.

Once we decided exactly where on the Continent we wanted to visit (London and Paris), out next step was selecting a reliable service that provides group tours to these locations. Based on a friend's suggestion, we opted for a company called Trafalgar Tours.  Since this organization mainly services clients who are traveling  from the US, our next step was to contact (what turns out to be) Trafalgar's only  representative agency in the Philippines: Pan Pacific Travel Corp which is located in Metro-Manila to book our itinerary.

This is where the fun began. When I called in our information to this agency, it turned out that the agent misspelled our last name when transcribing it to the airline, Singapore Airlines; and I wasn't aware of this error until  I reviewed an online detail of the airline reservations. Correcting it required cancellation of the original air reservations and re-booking  the flight (and of course the tour as well) to a later date and a different airline, Cathay Pacific.  This is because Singapore considers a name change (even if it's a correction) as a new passenger booking,  and the original flight was already sold out except for standby,  which we  waited in vain for several days to see if that status could be changed to confirmed.. To complicate the issue, the agent dragged her feet about getting us more suitable arrangements at the original ticket price,  and it took a letter to the vice president of the firm to get that done. We finally settled on a departure date of March 9.

Then I had to remind the travel agent to send me the the Trafalgar documents which she should have done earlier on her own without my prompting and  which upon arrival were incomplete . Pan Pacific is very hard to contact as their phone lines are always busy, so I sent her an email about the missing papers.  I never did get a response.

Our next step was securing exit and re-entry permits from the Bureau of Immigration.  These documents are required for almost all non-citizens who are leaving and returning to the Philippines.  The question was whether we had to go to the BI main office in Intramuros and jump through bureaucratic hoops there to secure these papers. According to agents with whom I spoke at BI headquarters and at the airport, that step is no longer necessary because Lydia and I both hold ACR I-cards.  These supposedly eliminate such hassles that were once required under ACR-ICR document, the forerunner of the I-card. 

So that's where matters stand at this time, one day before our trip, We're packed and  have completed the airline advanced check-in and seat selection.  Now we can only hope that we have dotted all our i's and crossed all our t's to get our journey itself off to a smooth start.