6-Year-Old Boy Has Real-Life ‘Home Alone 2’ Holiday Travel Mishap
One of the Christmas movies my family and I watched this month was Home Alone 2. In the 1992 sequel, Macaulay Culkin returns as Kevin McCallister to experience childhood abandonment all over again. Only this time, instead of being left “home alone,” young Kevin is forgotten at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He ends up on a flight to New York City instead of Miami with the rest of his family. Something similar happened to a 6-year-old last week.
According to WINK-TV, Spirit Airlines pulled their own Home Alone 2 mishap during the hectic holiday travel season. The airline sent a young boy to the wrong city despite seemingly watching over him the whole time. Since the kid was an unaccompanied minor, he would have had to have been supervised by a Spirit Airlines employee.
On December 21st, the 6-year-old was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Fort Myers, Florida, where his grandmother, Maria Ramos, was expecting him for a Christmas visit. Instead, the boy ended up on a plane going to Orlando. But he had a ticket for Fort Myers and was checked into the correct flight at the airport in Philly. His bag made it to Fort Myers but he did not. It’s quite perplexing.
Dude, Where’s My 6-Year-Old?
When the boy called his grandmother to say he had landed in the wrong city, she wanted answers. The report indicated that Ms. Ramos made the three hour drive to Orlando to pick up her grandson but had not heard directly from the airlines. Spirit Airlines has apologized to the family and released the following statement:
On Dec. 21, an unaccompanied child traveling from Philadelphia (PHL) to Fort Myers (RSW) was incorrectly boarded on a flight to Orlando (MCO). The child was always under the care and supervision of a Spirit Team Member, and as soon as we discovered the error, we took immediate steps to communicate with the family and reconnect them. We take the safety and responsibility of transporting all of our Guests seriously and are conducting an internal investigation. We apologize to the family for this experience.
The boy is safely reunited with his family and that’s the most important thing. I’m sure Spirit Airlines is doing everything they can to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. In Home Alone 2, it was American Airlines that made the blunder of not checking Kevin’s boarding pass. But, really, his parents were just in over their heads with all those kids and their ambitious travel plans.