The nightmare of a cancelled flight
However well you plan your trip abroad, there are always some things that you can’t plan for. On a recent trip to the South of France a few friends and I arrived at the airport in plenty of time. We joined the appropriate budget airline queue and we waited. And we waited. And we waited. Eventually, after some hours had passed, our flight was called forward, so we checked in and waved goodbye to our luggage with a definite sense of trepidation, as the departure time for our flight had now passed – something was clearly wrong. We then waited even longer for our gate number to be called, and then longer again at the gate. Until, at around the time we should have been landing in France, we were informed that our flight had been cancelled, as the staff had now gone into overtime. So we collected our luggage from the carousel and attempted to complain… only there was no-one to complain to. Eventually we had to book our own replacement flights, to take us out the next morning, and find accommodation in the airport. This comprised sleeping 6 people in a twin room at the extortionately expensive airport hotel. We may as well have looked into camper vans for sale considering the price we ended up paying…
The next morning our replacement flight went smoothly, and we landed on French soil on time. However we then had another issue… we had flown to Marseilles, and our original flight had been to Nice. This wouldn’t have mattered too much, had we not reserved hire cars at the original destination. Our hire company had no cars available to take instead, so our only option was to take public transport from Marseilles to Nice, to pick up our reserved cars. This turned out to involve two shuttle buses, three walks, and a lengthy, but beautiful, train journey. We then picked up the cars and drove to our villa. Only 30 hours later than we expected to be!
