Published Friday, March 12, 1999 Their flight home "is guaranteed," said Renee Welsh, owner of Uniglobe All Star Travel, Ellwood City. Ms. Welsh, who booked the trip for the 24 students through Phoenix-based Sand and Sun Tours, said she has spent much of the last four days making sure the women get home without the major glitches that marred the start of their vacation.
Ms. Welsh said her agency had been assured that the Westminster group, along with about 150 other college students who were part of the original planeload of tourists, will be on the Pan Am flight. She said she has requested a passenger manifest of the flight to make doubly sure of that.
The Westminster group, all members of Zeta Tau Alpha sorority, got to the airport early for their 4:30 p.m. flight on Sunday, Ms. Welsh said. The departure time came and went and by early evening the women still had no information about their flight, and there was no representative from Surf and Sun on hand to explain what was happening. Ms. Welsh said one of the travelers, Shannon Mack, called her to tell her about the problems; Miss Mack had worked for Uniglobe last summer and is engaged to Ms. Welsh's brother.
Ms. Welsh called Surf and Sun in Phoenix with no success and headed off to the airport. She stayed with the students until they finally left at 3:10 a.m. Monday on Panagra Airlines -- not the original carrier scheduled, but the one that finally showed up.
The bad start only got worse. The students arrived in Cancun at about 7 a.m., and were picked up by a Surf and Sun bus that dropped them at a shopping mall for breakfast at 10:30. The driver said he'd return to take them to their hotel in about 15 minutes.
At 1:30 that afternoon, Ms. Welsh got another call from Miss Mack: The bus had never returned. Ms. Welsh called the Mexican police and the U.S. Embassy to help look after the women.
The students' hotel had been overbooked and there was no room for them. Still unable to get through to the main offices of Surf and Sun after repeated tries, Ms. Welsh found rooms for the 24 at the Presidente Intercontinental, a six-star hotel. She also managed to reach the Surf and Sun's representative in Cancun, who agreed the company would pay for the upgrade in lodging, and also arranged for taxis to take the girls to their new hotel.
Now Ms. Welsh is working on getting refunds for the two days of vacation the students missed. She's also working on refunds for the telephone calls back and forth to Cancun. In the midst of this, she's been thinking of what went wrong and why, she said.
It seems obvious, she said Thursday, that both the flight and the hotel were overbooked. Ms. Welsh said she thinks the bus driver never came back for the students because he didn't have a hotel to take them to. While there's been fingerpointing all around, Ms. Welsh feels it was the tour company, not the charter flight service nor the hotel, that was responsible for the overbooking.
She also thinks the group had more trouble getting answers and good service because they were college students. When she arrived at the airport, Ms. Welsh said, and asked why there was no Surf and Sun representative, airport officials said there was one, but the man -- another college student -- hadn't wanted to identify himself because the women were so angry. Ms. Welsh noted that no one had told the students a representative was there.
