Good morning everyone. A few months ago, I booked a flight on Tarom Airlines (SkyTeam airline based in Romania) to fly from Chisinau, Moldova (KIV) to Bucharest, Romania (OTP) to Sofia, Bulgaria (SOF) with a 7 hour layover in Bucharest to explore the city. I booked the flight directly on the Tarom Airlines website and all was good until I received an email from Tarom with the subject line “Schedule Change.” If you get a similar email from Tarom Airlines regarding a schedule change, I will show you exactly what to do. Since the whole email was in Romanian, and my Romanian is a little rusty, I used Google Translate to understand the email.
I copied and pasted the email into Google Translate and clicked the blue Translate button. The website is smart enough to detect the language (Romanian) and translate it it into my native language (English). You can manually change these 2 languages if the detected languages are incorrect. Based on the translation, Tarom Airlines is alerting me to a change in my reservation and instructing me to view my reservation online.
After looking up my reservation on the Tarom Airlines website, I found out that both of my flights were cancelled that day, because there will be a holiday on that day and the airport will be closed. I’ve never heard of an airport being closed for a holiday, but I guess in Romania, it happens. I talked to my travel companion and we decided that we wanted to take the same exact flights the following day. He also did research and found out the best way to communicate with the reservations department was via email. So I sent an email to rezervari@tarom.ro and reservationvictoria@tarom.ro along with the details of the flights I wanted, my record locator, and ticket number. I was hoping to hear back, since I didn’t want to call Tarom Airlines to fix my reservation.
2 days later (actually the next business day), I received an email from eticket@amadeus.com with my new flight details. I confirmed the details on the Tarom Airlines website and my flight details looked correct.
I’m hoping no more schedule changes occur since the flights we picked out work well for our schedule. I’m excited for my trip since I’ve never been to Eastern Europe. If you have any questions about contacting Tarom Airlines, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!
hahaha of course this would happen in Romania… Can you please share the date of travel/of the holiday, I’ll check for you if it’s what’s actually going on, because even though it’s Romania, in the 18 years I lived in there I had never heard of the airport closing for a holiday.
January 7, 2019. I’m not sure what holiday it is.
January 7th is Orthodox Christmas Day in Moldova. I guess they take seriously there as seriously as they can do in lovely Moldova :-)) meaning that they don’t want to risk a chance of some random airport dispatcher to be inebriated, so they just close the whole airport.
Yes, it is unlikely Bucharest (OTP) would be closed unless weather or other. Chisinau is 1/6 the size so likelier there.
Makes sense to me.
Haha, I guess I will be celebrating Orthodox Christmas Day too. What can I expect from the holiday?
I guess you should expect that everything may be closed just as here on December 25th. Hopefully, you will be served well in your hotel’s restaurant. Moldovan cuisine is very tasteful, while their wines are just okay, IMHO.
Thanks for the advice, I’m hoping for some good Moldovan food during my trip :)