Around 2am on the Saturday morning that I was leaving New York for LA, I received a text message from United to let me know that my EWR-LAX flight had been cancelled and that they had booked me on a flight 2 hours later.

That was weird – as my immediate thought was why put me on a later flight when the reason for cancelling my original flight was the snow!

A quick call to United and I found out that it had nothing to do with snow, but a mechanical problem with the aircraft in Barcelona. OK!

Well as I was awake I asked whether there was an earlier flight to get me out before the snow came in to Newark. The agent told me that there were only Coach seats available earlier (I was upgraded with a certificate) and so I left it. Being three in the morning I wasn’t thinking straight and hasn’t considered other New York airports. Doh!

So, a call back, and this time I got the United Reservation Centre in Hawaii. For those that have not experienced this team, they have to be the 5* service team for United. Engaged, informative and interested in helping, the agent came back with two options. A direct from JFK at 2pm (upgrade confirmed) or a connection through Chicago, from La Guardia at 7am. Of course this mean saying goodbye to the nice sleeper seats I had on the original plane.

So LGA it was! She rebooked me and grabbed the last two aisle seats and as I was up, I bathed and headed to the airport.

I had quite a lot of UBER credit so the $53 ride to LGA ended up costing $28. A bargain.

I had checked-in in the hotel lobby whilst waiting for the car to arrive and so went right to the United Club, which with this being a Saturday morning was empty:

United had their usual offerings:

There was a very small line at Security and I got to the plane in plenty of time for Boarding.