Moving Out

We're finally back in Barcelona, and the last days in London have been quite busy. Moving is always a little bit stressful, and it requires you to do looots of things...

The last week we tried to meet with everybody who's living there, all the time, which required a lot of organising and planning. We more or less managed to see them, but in the end there were some rushed up good-byes and short meetings.

While doing that, we tried to start packing to move out of the apartment. That was quite horrible...

Moving is hard, but moving by using the plane is extra hard, because of the limitations in weight and volume that you have. Even when we already knew we were leaving furniture behind there were lots of things to pack. So, after several failed tries, we managed to send 3 initial packages and start filling the first suitcase. The initial plan was to use 3 suitcases, and that's what we had booked.

After seeing that we were not making much progress, we decided to leave it for the final two days. that's always a nice extra motivation to finish, the fact that there is no more time left. We already had 3 suitcases, but one of them was broken in several spots and we didn't trust it would reach Barcelona with full integrity. Therefore we bought a new cheap one from Tesco, just to survive for this trip, and the night we had to pack everything we threw away the broken one. We checked in to the flight with 3 suitcases, and we were ready to start packing.

We originally came with 3 suitcases, and we also sent 2 packages. We bought some things, but we did get rid of lots of winter clothes in trips to Vilnius and Barcelona, and we sent 3 packages with things we bought while in London. We thought it was going to be the same as our arrival.

Problems started when we finished the first 2 suitcases. We still had way too many things to pack. Clearly it was not going to be enough with one more suitcase. So we got a box from the garage that we still had from a received package and decided we were going to sent another one.

We filled the box, and still there were too many things. Remembering the thrown suitcase, we ran towards the trash, and luckily it was still there. Sure, it was broken, but if we wrapped it in plastic it would probably survive. With 4 suitcases we managed to fit most things, with some left for the hand luggage, but the 4 suitcases weighted close to 24 each. British Airways is generous, but the maximum weight per suitcase is 23, and we didn't want to risk it, so we started a nightmarish process of removing a little thing, weighting the suitcases, putting it somewhere else, and weighting them again.

We finally decided to load all extra kilos in the most resilient one, which reached 28 Kg, and we would pay the 40 pounds charge for one overweight suitcase. At this point it seemed a cheap solution...Only thing left was to add a suitcase to our plane ticket.

So, we proceeded to the flight booking information, and tried to add a suitcase. First, we had some trouble finding a place in the web where the suitcase could be added, but well, we managed to access it after making some google searches. We had the page, and there was a combo box where you mark how many suitcases to add to you booking. The combo box was in the 0 position, so I went and tried to change it....unsuccessfully.

After checking it with several browsers with same results, we read that once you had done the on-line check-in, you could not add more suitcases. That was stupid and made no sense to us...well, except for the fact that if you add them at the airport it was twice the price. This way if you make a mistake they can get more money out of you.

This made us angry, for obvious reasons. It was a cheap trick to get money. Therefore, before surrendering and waiting to be in the airport to add baggage, I went back to the webpage for one last experiment. With Chrome I decided to have a look at the combo box. Indeed, the html code marked it as disabled, and having only the "0 suitcases to add" option. Well, we didn't want that. So I edited it, changed it to "enable", and added a new value in the combo box, a simple "1". With the combo box active, I selected the "1" value, expecting the page to fail in some way.

The javascript function that got activated by changing the combo worked fine, and informed us that we were going to add a suitcase to our booking. Therefore, we sent the "edited" form. This is the step when your information is processed by the server, so it doesn't matter what you did before, the server rechecks everything. All the editing that I did was just for fun, to see how the form would fail when resent. The only thing, it didn't.

Everything was perfectly fine and in order according to the website. We just needed to pay the online fee, and we'd have a nice new suitcase in our booking. We paid, while being rather surprised....but yes, checking the booking from another computer showed 2 suitcases instead of 1. What we did is illegal, we're pretty sure...but we shouldn't be able to do it, and that's illegal as well, not to protect yourself from these things. We paid everything anyway, we just avoided a trick to get money out of customers...

Just in case, we saved the bill of the new suitcase, finished packing somehow, and next day we went to the airport, with the help of Dani Fernandez. We had printed the boarding passes and the bill, and we went to baggage drop. We had one overweight suitcase, but we knew that and it was fine. The clerk there checked our information, and then told us that we only had 3 suitcases.

We kind of expected that, so with the most innocent face we could make, explained that we had bought the extra suitcase, and presented the bill as proof. We said we did that before check-in, and the clerk decided to make a call, I guess to check our booking somewhere else. When he asked about suitcases they told him that it was 4, and the clerk proceeded to say everything's fine and let us drop everything.

So, there was no technical problem in letting us add a suitcase after check-in. They could have added this option and just resend the check-in information if some part of the booking was changed, but they didn't let us, in order to get some extra money the moment we made any mistake...

Anyway, after all this troubles we managed to safely get back to Barcelona. We've been some time there now, and we're getting ready for Sochi, but we won't move there yet. We'll explain more about all these new preparations some other time, in another post :)