I think that some of you have never heard about these islands, as most of us would link the Caribbean islands with Dominican Republic. But this time we visited Guadeloupe and Martinique. Let’s start from the begining.
The company, where currently I am working, has recently opened a low-cost airline, called Level. Initially, their base was only Barcelona (BCN), but later they have also opened connections from Paris (ORY). As a total maniac of cheap flights I checked their proposals immediately, once the new routes has been announced.
One of them was the destination to Martinique (Ford de France – FDF) and Guadeloupe (Pointe-à-Pitre – PTP). The analysis was really quick, as the prices were really low (starting from 99 € for one way ticket). For some reason I found Martinique more atractive than Guadeloupe. We have dicided to book the tickets from 26th September to 6th October 2018 for 218 € per person for the round trip (almost a year before the actual trip!). A few months later, I also bought tickets from Cracow to Paris (Charles de Gaulle – CDG) on the 25th September 2018 (184 PLN per person) and Paris Charles de Gaulle on 6th October 2018 this time to Warsaw (WAW) with LOT (220 PLN per person).
Everything was well planned and there were no signs that something is going to change our itinerart.
I even managed to book accommodation in Paris for one night as well as in Martinique for the main stay. Well, almost a month before it turns out that unfortunately our flight from Paris to Martinique has been canceled. Level, of course, gave us the opportunity to refund the cost of tickets, but what about the accommodation? Unfortunately, according to the European Union directive, the Carrier is not responsible for any changes before 14 days after departure. So we knew that we could lose some money.
So I started to look for plan B!
This thought accompanies me in life for a long time now and I know I could not give up immediately 🙂 Level also allowed us to change our destination. This was an option for us! d I thought ‘Well, you have to visit also Guadeloupe’. Instead of flying on 26th September to Martinique, we flew to Guadeloupe on 27th September. After two days, we flew to Martinique with additional purchased flights on the Air Antilles airline for 90 € per person. It was actually the only cost we incurred in connection with this change.
Everything ended well, but it is a lesson learnt to avoid buying tickets for two different airlines in the future. The risk is high…