KLM Royal Dutch Airlines review: Epic and costly disaster getting home

I need to start by saying that I have, generally, had very good experiences flying KLM. The flights are comfortable, staff is friendly, food is tolerable. But the challenges we faced getting home from (California to Amsterdam) at the beginning of this month were a nightmare. As happened to many, our flight home after New Years was cancelled due to weather. That is understandable. We were automatically booked on the next available flight. This flight was scheduled to depart the following day at 8:25am. We were staying several hours away from the airport and I was traveling alone (and sick) with my two young children. I would have never picked this flight time in a million years because getting up at 3am to get to the airport for a full day of travel was not feasible, let alone advisable for us, so I went online to rebook. The website and app both told me this was not an option and that I needed to call customer service. So I called customer service to change the flight and subsequently spent a full 6.5 hrs on the phone. I waited on hold twice (for nearly two hours each time) only to get someone, begin the change process and then have my call dropped before we could finalize the change with no callback, even though I provided a call back number. I finally reached a nice man at the KLM desk in San Francisco. He was able to assist me in getting on a flight that left at 2pm instead. When we spoke, I was under the impression that I had to pay for the flights but would get refunded for the original tickets since the flight change was neither my preference nor my choice. So I paid just shy of $3400 over the phone, on top of the 5000+ euro I had already paid of our original roundtrip tickets. We were originally booked in premier on a direct flight and ended up, on our replacement flight, having to have a 3+ hour layover in Atlanta in the middle of the night. We also spent the first leg of our trip in economy, which was not what we paid for. It took us 28hrs to get home. Come to find out today, after several back and forth emails with the man at SFO, that there will be no refund, that $3400 was just a CHANGE FEE. A change fee for a flight that I did not want to change, for transit that was significantly less convenient for us and for seats that were not what we paid for originally! (To be clear, I would have loved to just stay in California until the weather passed and we could get a direct flight but my children are in elementary school here, in the Netherlands, and the rules around missing class are extremely strict, so that was not a possibility. As it was, they ended up missing a day because they were so jetlagged they could barely function.) So, in the end, I spend over half a day on the phone and paid over 10k in total for a pretty grueling travel experience that was nowhere near what I had originally booked. I would have been happy to get the refund in flight vouchers since we travel back and forth occasionally to see family but I received nothing. Not only that, but my request for compensation for the extra expense incurred due to the initial cancellation was denied. I am very disappointed in the way KLM handled this whole interaction and will definitely look to other airlines for our continental flights in future.