A very leisurely day at home refreshing the Etihad web site to see if they’d open up award space on their JFK-Abu Dhabi A380 at some point, but no. Even with 7+ seats open they wouldn’t budge.
Soooo, we’re back to the plan as booked which is a 17:30 departure on United from ORD to Toronto, then connecting to our Air Canada 787-800 to London. We’ll see Miss Etihad on Monday at Heathrow.
We tried to use the United app to checkin on the L but were stymied. The app actually was pretty easy to use, and even would let you upload a photo of yout passport to the app and it would analyze it and parse it using OCR.
Mine worked with a so-so photo on the rockin’ L, Jeff’s didn’t work at all. So he didn’t get checked in, while I did. But I didn’t get boarding passes in the app (or in email) so was ultimately confused about what exactly happened.
Once we arrived at ORD we went up to the self-service devices and checked in. It treated me like I had never checked in via the app, while Jeff also got checked in. The self-service devices worked great, if a little slowly. I think the app might have a little more work to do, but they’re well on their way to something really useful.
We board our United A319 at 17:05 for our 17:40 departure to Toronto and the start of this around the world trip.