An expensive mistake

Our trip has been remarkably smooth so far. Given that most of it was planned whenever rare pockets of time made themselves available between classes, recruiting, and personal life over November and December, our itinerary has held up pretty well. The amount of time we've spent in each city and country has been just right, the hotels we've booked have worked out as planned, and all the flights have moved us from place to place with minimum disruption to our travel plans.

That changed today.

Granted, we woke up a little late, but by the time we were at the check-out desk of our hotel, we still had 90 min. before our flight left for Langkawi island. The airport was 30 min. away by high speed train, and so we'd make it to our flight counter with just an hour to spare. Perfect for flying domestically.

However, upon checking out I casually enquired how much I'd have to pay in taxi fare, if in case we decided against the train option. The concierge told me that it would be too expensive to take a taxi, given that the airport was over an hour away. Obviously something didn't jive. When we had arrived in KL, it had taken 30 min. by train to get to our hotel, so unless some pretty basic laws of physics were about to be violated, it should have taken us the same amount of time to get back to the airport from the hotel.

It turned out that the terminal for domestic departures was over an hour away, while the separate international terminal, where we had originally arrived, was only 30 min. away. So why had we, seasoned travelers both of us, made such a ridiculous mistake? Both terminals are called KLIA - the domestic one just has LCCT appended to its name.

Now, I'm not trying to exonerate myself, but if I saw KLIA and KLIA-LCCT, I would assume that LCCT was just a sub-terminal of KLIA. Further, since almost all international airports I've flown from have a domestic terminal, I would be justified in reaching this seemingly logical conclusion. But unfortunately KLIA-LCCT is a completely different terminal in a completely different geographical location.

In summary, we missed our flight, and had to rebook ourselves on the next available one, which was subsequently delayed two hours. With all the change fees and rebookings, the overall damage came out to $122, but given how tightly we'd been able to stick to our budget so far (tight to begin with), the change still stung.

Arrival at our hotel, however, made our troubles fall away. The Westin Langkawi is beautiful, and easily the best hotel we have ever stayed at. Our room is spectacular, and looks out onto the ocean. The best part of it is, it's all free - I love Starwood points! For all you budding consultants out there, you may work like a slave dog and never be home to manage a decent social life, but the hotel and airline points help to soothe the pain a little.

I took the picture below while walking around outside the hotel after dinner. In the foreground is one of the hotels many infinity pools.