Well it looks like i was able to come up with a resolution to our travel problems. First off I want to pass along kudos to the Delta agents, when I was finally able to get through to them, who worked very hard to make this work. Secondly I know these are tough times for airlines but if you can't get to a live person after literally waiting all day (12 hours in my case) then you might as well shut it down.

On Monday morning the seats and flights which had mysteriously disappeared over the weekend were back, including the 2 seats they'd yanked from our Denver travelers. The website wouldn't let me change the tickets online so I started my efforts to get through to an agent. Their voice system said I'd get a callback in 2 hours but 12 hours later, not a word. I called several times to see what the wait times were and they were pushing 5 hours.

Today I started at 7am where I was told it was a 30 minute wait. The seats were still available on the afternoon flight. By the time I got the call back at 9am, the agent informed me there was only 1 seat left so getting back the seats originally taken away by Delta was no longer an option.

So on to Plan B. Delta has a red-eye out of Denver that arrives in Atlanta at 6am which allows a connection to a 9am departure to St. Thomas. For work reasons our Denver folks couldn't leave a day earlier so this was the only way for them to get to St. Thomas in time for our planned Day 0 at The Moorings. The 3 of us from Houston will head to Atlanta a day early, spend the night at the airport, and meet up with our Denver folks for the trip down.

The advantage of this change is we get to St. Thomas by 1pm which allows us to make the regular ferry even if there is still only the 4pm ferry by that time.

While we probably won't need their services, the response from Dolphin water taxi and Island Birds charter to my quote requests was great.