10/06/2026
Yesterday was a very good reminder that planning a trip and recovering one when it goes sideways are two different jobs.
After several hours of delays at the Palma airport, our flight to Granada was cancelled. The airline rebooked us automatically—four days later, after our planned stay there would already have ended.
We looked at every realistic alternative. Anything that could get us to Granada sooner required an overnight connection somewhere else, which would have turned our three-night stay into essentially one night surrounded by two transit days.
So we let Granada go.
That decision was the easy part.
The next six hours were spent dealing with eight different vendors: cancelling a hotel, tours, Alhambra tickets and a train, sorting out the cancelled air, booking new flights to Seville, extending our stay in Mallorca and beginning the travel-insurance process.
By the time I finally closed my laptop, we had lost nearly an entire vacation day to fixing the trip.
Thankfully, we’re in a pretty wonderful place to be “stuck.” We were able rebook in the same room at Jumeirah, and travel insurance should absorb most of the financial loss from the cancelled Granada portion. We’ll fly directly to Seville on October 8 and pick up the trip from there.
But the experience reinforced something that’s easy to overlook when booking travel online feels so simple:
You can enjoy doing your own research without having to take on all of the recovery work yourself. Find the hotels. Compare the cruises. Send me the places you love. I’m happy to work that way.
There’s still real value in having an advisor make the bookings, because when something breaks, being the booking agent matters. If I’m not attached to the reservation, suppliers won't allow me to make changes on your behalf.
If this had been a client trip, they still would have made the big decision—try to save Granada or move on—but much of the calls, cancellations, rebooking and insurance work would have been mine.
We finally made it upstairs for a cocktail and the first real sunset we’d seen in Mallorca.
I’ll be unpacking more of what happened, what the insurance should cover and what I learned from it in the next Maven newsletter.
I’ll be unpacking more of what happened and what I learned from it in the next Maven newsletter.
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