Back in February — a solid six months before we ever set foot on a plane — we spotted an ad that stopped us mid-scroll: Level, offering one-way flights from New York to Barcelona starting at $150.
We don’t usually book international flights that far out. Our rhythm is typically a month ahead for domestic trips, three months for international ones. But $150 to Spain is the kind of number that makes you throw your own rules out the window.
We’d never flown Level before, but we discovered they’re an Iberia partner — essentially Iberia’s low-cost carrier — which gave us just enough confidence to hit “purchase” and figure out the logistics later.
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Gateway Hopping, Our Way
This wasn’t our first time doing what travel writer Pauline Frommer calls “gateway hopping” — flying into a major international hub city first, then catching your transatlantic flight from there instead of paying a premium to fly direct from a smaller airport.
For us, that meant a separate flight from Detroit to New York, then an entirely separate reservation for the overseas leg. Emphasis on separate. These weren’t connections — they were two different tickets on two different airlines, which meant if one ran late, the other had zero obligation to wait for us.
That’s exactly why we build in a big buffer. This time, it was eight hours in New York. If your two flights land in different terminals at JFK, you have to exit security entirely and go back through for your next flight, so that cushion isn’t optional — it’s essential.
Our Detroit-to-JFK leg went off without a hitch: on time, if a little bumpy thanks to storms in the area. Small bumps. Foreshadowing, as it turns out.
Our Favorite Way to Kill a Layover: The TWA Hotel
With hours to spare at JFK, we did something we’d genuinely tell you to do too: we headed straight for the TWA Hotel, the old TWA terminal reimagined as a gorgeous tribute to mid-century aviation. It’s the kind of layover stop that doesn’t feel like an airport at all.
We had dinner reservations at the Sunken Lounge — a little warm (warmth was a running theme on this entire trip, if we’re honest), but otherwise exactly the kind of spot where you don’t mind killing a few hours.
A few things worth knowing if you’re planning your own JFK layover here:
- The Connie is a vintage plane converted into a bar, where you can choose lounge seating or actual airplane seats. Peak aviation-nerd energy, and we loved it.
- The full-service restaurant, tucked into the terminal’s original dining room, is stunning but comes with a price tag to match.
- Quick-service counters are available if you just want something fast.
- A few more bars are scattered around if a drink is all you’re after.
We’d actually looked into booking an overnight room there too, since we had a layover on the way home. Rates ran $450–550 a night, and by the time we checked, our dates were already sold out. Having eaten there, we don’t think we missed much — the common areas are the experience. Unless you’ve got money to burn on a very cool place to sleep for eight hours, we’d skip the room and just come for a meal.
The Email That Changed Everything
While we were settled into the Sunken Lounge, an email from Level landed in our inboxes: our 11:55 PM departure had been delayed — to 2:45 AM.
Not ideal, but not catastrophic either. We’d planned to get to the airport around 8:00 PM to check in, since Level isn’t the kind of airline where you can just pull up a digital boarding pass. You have to go to the desk in person — no TSA PreCheck available, either, since Level doesn’t participate.
It turned out not to be a big deal in the moment. That terminal at JFK is dead by 10:00 PM most nights. When we checked in, the agent confirmed we knew about the delay and handed us two $25 food vouchers — a genuinely nice gesture, and honestly more than we’ve ever gotten from a domestic carrier after a delay.
The catch? She told us the vouchers were good “everywhere in the airport.” They were not. By the time we went looking for food, it was right before 10:00 PM, and the terminal was shutting down around us. We wandered around the terminal and found everything closed (Google Maps lied to us about a Dunkin’ Donuts that was very much not open), and finally found a Hudson News about to close its doors for the night. The cashier agreed to take the vouchers, and we had five minutes to grab $50 worth of charcuterie packs, chips, a slightly risky airport salad, and a stash of Reese’s before she started kicking everyone out.
Lightning, Literally
While we waited at the gate, word started circulating: the plane we were supposed to take had reportedly been struck by lightning on the ground. We’re not aircraft maintenance experts, but we’d assume a plane that’s possibly been struck by lightning goes through more than a flashlight inspection before being cleared for an eight-hour ocean crossing. And yet: 2:45 AM became 3:30, became 4:30, in these slow, demoralizing hour-and-a-half increments. We’d heard the pilots were set to time out at 5:00 AM.
What struck us most wasn’t the delay itself — it was how calm everyone stayed. We expected outrage. Instead, the whole terminal settled into this collective, half-asleep stupor, broken only by the same two PA announcements looping every twenty minutes: no firearms in your carry-on, and no smoking in the terminal (though by hour six, we were both convinced the announcer was saying “shmoking,” and we were losing it a little).
If they’d just canceled the flight at midnight, we would have left. Instead we sat there in delay purgatory, drifting in and out of sleep, until the unmistakable smell of breakfast sausage started drifting from a nearby restaurant. That smell is a very specific kind of bad news when you’re supposed to already be in Spain.
At 5:00 AM, we heard it over the desk radio in Spanish before we heard it in English: “Su vuelo está cancelado.” Your flight is canceled. And then the gate agents simply ran off. Not toward us — away from us.
Normally, our go-to advice after a cancellation is: don’t run to the desk, call the airline directly. If you can get someone on the phone with your confirmation number and ask to be rebooked on a specific flight, it’s usually faster than the chaos at the gate.
This situation broke that rule. Level only flies once a day out of JFK, which means there’s no perpetual desk presence anywhere in the airport — their check-in counter only opens four hours before departure. There was no one to run to.
So we called. The first rep told us we’d get rebooking options by email within 15 minutes. That email never came. What we did learn, though, was genuinely useful: Level is a European carrier, which means it’s bound by EU passenger protection regulations — rules that are dramatically more generous than what U.S. carriers typically offer. Under those protections, airlines generally can’t just bump you two days out (like Spirit once did to us in Florida) unless there is truly no available seat on any carrier for that entire window.
Armed with that, one of us spent a chunk of the morning on hold, quoting statute numbers, asking to be booked on the same-day Iberia or British Airways flights instead, and requesting a supervisor. We got nowhere. The rep dodged direct questions and kept repeating that an email was coming “in a couple of hours.”
While all this was happening, we turned our attention to finding a day room. We booked one through a day-room website at a nearby airport hotel — a whole ordeal in itself, involving the AirTrain to Federal Circle, then a hotel shuttle. The earliest slot available was 8:00 AM. We arrived closer to 6:00 AM, hoping something might open up early.
Nothing did. We sat in that lobby for hours, sweating through a broken air conditioning unit that seemed to blast cold air directly at the front desk and nowhere else, while the rest of the lobby baked. Every time we checked back in, the story changed — a rep would say a room was coming, then vanish, or housekeeping would radio in a “clean” room only to reveal it had already been handed to someone else. With something like 60 flights reportedly canceled that night across the area, every nearby hotel was slammed.
It didn’t fully click into place until we finally reached the baggage carousel — the one place in this whole saga where the room’s collective calm cracked. People who had been eerily composed all night were suddenly yelling at each other, at staff, at no one in particular. Overnight exhaustion plus sudden uncertainty is a rough combination, and we felt it too. By that point, coherent thought was basically gone. We just needed a bed.
We finally got into a room around 9:30 AM — more than an hour after our reservation technically started.
A Full Workday, on Zero Sleep
One of us showered and immediately passed out. The other had a full day of work meetings scheduled — because, yes, we were supposed to already be settled into Barcelona by then — and jumped straight onto a call, running on no sleep whatsoever.
Calls to the airline continued throughout the day, and the tone shifted noticeably — from dismissive (“you’ll get an email soon”) to genuinely concerned by mid-afternoon, when a rep admitted they were still trying to locate a plane for that night’s departure. By 4:00 PM New York time, Level’s customer service had closed for the day — it was already 10:00 PM in Spain.
Somewhere in there, the idea of just giving up and flying home to Detroit came up more than once. Not as a joke — as a real, seriously considered option. That’s saying something, because bailing on a trip entirely is about as far from either of our natural instincts as it gets. But being stranded in one of the most expensive cities in the country, with no real information and no end in sight, will do that to you.
We’re calling it now: this was the worst travel experience of our lives. Not because any single piece of it was unbearable on its own, but because of how long it dragged on with zero clarity.
One short nap and a shower later, a plan started to take shape: head back to the TWA Hotel for food (on Level’s dime), then get to the check-in desk four and a half hours before the next day’s single scheduled Level flight, bags packed, passports out, and simply be there — first in line, impossible to miss.
We got there almost five hours early. The desk was still showing Iberia branding, which briefly had us panicking that the Level flight had been canceled outright. That’s where we learned a phrase worth remembering if you’re ever stuck in a similar spot with a European carrier: tell the agent you’re a “displaced passenger.” It’s specific airline-industry language, and using it tends to trigger a different level of obligation on their end.
Sure enough, about 40 minutes later, the same staff swapped their lanyards, switched the signage from Iberia to Level, and reopened the same desk under a new name. We were second in line. The supervisor turned out to be genuinely helpful once we were standing in front of her, taking photos of our passports and confirming our seats over WhatsApp on the spot.
She asked if we wanted seats on that night’s flight. We said yes before she could finish the sentence.
We went through TSA for the second time in under 24 hours, got shoved into the middle seats of the last boarding group, and didn’t fully relax until the plane actually left the ground.
In the end, the whole ordeal amounted to a 24-hour delay. Objectively, in the world of air travel horror stories, that’s not enormous. If Level had simply told us upfront, “your plane was struck by lightning, here’s a hotel voucher, you’re rebooked for tomorrow,” this wouldn’t have cracked our worst-trip list. It was the complete lack of communication, documentation, and clear information — stretched across a sleepless night — that made it what it was.
- Know your consumer protections before you fly. If you’re flying a European carrier, even a low-cost one, EU passenger rights can work seriously in your favor during cancellations — but you often have to know the specific language to invoke them.
- “Displaced passenger” is a phrase worth remembering. It’s not magic, but it signals to airline staff that you know your rights.
- Single daily flights carry real risk. If your airline only flies once a day out of an airport, there’s no backup plane and often no staffed desk outside a narrow check-in window. Budget extra buffer accordingly.
- Document everything in real time. Screenshots of delay emails, times of phone calls, names of reps — we were grateful to have kept track, especially given how little official documentation Level ever provided.
- A cheap flight is still a gamble. I don’t think we would ever fly Level again, but for other low-cost flights, we’re going in next time with lower expectations for communication and a clearer game plan if things go sideways.
We made it to Barcelona. We’ll tell you all about that — and our time in Asturias — soon.
Want more real-time travel chaos as it happens? Catch the full story on our podcast, wherever you listen, and follow along with us for the rest of this Spain trip.
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