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Diaryland
Egypt Trip Cancelled 2004-10-06 @ 11:17 a.m.
I had a nice weekend spending time with my cousin in midtown Manhattan. When it came time for the flight to Egypt, however, things sadly fell through. I showed up at JFK about 2 hours before the flight. I felt I was running late since I had been advised to be there 3 hours before an international flight. There was only one other person from our tour group there and no sign of the guide we were supposed to meet, who also had our tickets. Not really thinking and somewhat in denial, I figured the guy was running late and sat down to read for awhile. An hour to flight time, only one other person had showed up and still no sign of our guide. We paged around the airport to no avail. Then, we used a cell phone to call Vision Travel and were not happy with the automated message we got.
We were told, simply, that the October 2nd trip to Egypt as well as another trip in November had been cancelled due to "internal office conflicts". Information was then provided about how to contact the attorney general and the feds travel restitution fund! At first, I was kind of in denial. I kept wondering "Am I making some sort of mistake? Maybe they're talking about a different Egypt trip. Maybe our guy will still show up at any minute." In the meantime though, while I processed this, I went about taking some practical actions. I went and talked to the manager of EgyptAir to see if anyone from Visions had called earlier to give us any heads up information. He said no, but two or three people had shown up much earlier and then heard the message and left. Well, the two ladies and I, who had flown all the way to New York from the South and the West Coast, went about getting things in order. We got Yvonne's luggage off the flight heading to Cairo and were able to swap our tickets for two weeks from then for tickets to go home the next night. I took the subway back to Andrea's place in Manhattan, and we went out for dinner and drinking. It was a bit of a hassle to coordinate things, because mom and dad were both at a wedding while all this was unfolding, and Andrea was gone for awhile too. Eventually though, everybody got up to speed and early the next morning I was on a flight back to San Jose. Surprisingly, I found myself taking it all very well. Maybe its because I wasn't the one paying the over $5000 for the trip.
The day after I got back, my parents received a letter in the mail from the attorney for Visions travel. Apparently, the owner and manager of our trip failed to show up for work a few days ago. His employees went about trying to find him to no avail. They found his place emptied and a letter inside his computer. In it, he said that his now deceased brother, the former owner of the company, had embezzled most of the money for the Egypt trip years ago and that he had hoped to make up the difference by signing up new people for the tour. When he failed to make the quota and wasn't even able to afford our tickets, he fled the country. My parents are opting out of suing the now bankrupt company in favor of applying for the restitution fund. They think they will likely get most of their money back, and may even get all of it back. Your prayers for justice and restitution will be appreciated.
"Details in the Fabric" - May 31, 2009
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