Bad Experiences?

Zack · Joined: 21 Feb 2005 Posts: 15

Ever had any bad experiences with an airline? This canrange from missing a flight, to getting searched, to almost crashing. Just anything that happened that is out of the nrom when flying.

My parents, when flying to Mexico almost got struck by lightning. It went right by their plane, and teh pilot came on and had to calm everyone down.

Laura · Joined: 16 May 2004 Posts: 446 Location: San Francisco

Well, I've had the usual...lost my luggage, had weather delays, lost my tickets once. But the only that really qualifies as truly bad was when my college boyfriend and I went to the Bahamas after graduation. We were on some charter flight -- I can't even recall the airline. We got on the plane, went down, had a good time, and then we got on the plane to go home. Before takeoff the head flight attendant called our name and forced us to get off the flight! It seems the flight was full and even though we checked in and boarded on time we had to get off because the flight was overbooked. That was REALLY WEIRD, since it was a charter and they should have the same number of people going down and coming back. We got some story about how someone missed the flight going down and so flew down on another airline, and that they wanted their seat back going back. That kind of blew our minds, after all, we were just hung-over college students. We had no one to call and were pretty stranded, but finally my boyfriend got ahold of his brother, who got through to the travel agent who booked our trip, who called the local tour operator, who sent someone to the airport to pick us up. The put us up in a decent hotel overnight and flew us out the next day on a regular airline. The whole thing was just really weird, and my boyfriend and his brother are convinced that something shady was going on related to drug smuggling!!!!! But I really have no idea. I was just glad to get home.

After that, however, I vowed never to fly another charter again. When the plane takes off there's no one left at the airport to complain to on the ground. If it had been a regular airline there would have been about six different phone numbers to call or people to talk to to find out what was going on and to get rebooked. If we hadn't made a pile of phone calls from a pay phone in the Bahamas and gotten my boyfriend's brother to help, we would have been totally hosed.

cocodrilo · Joined: 12 Apr 2004 Posts: 494 Location: Western Japan

I've had baggage lost numerous times(fortunately it was all returned!) mostly on American carriers!!!(Grrr!) I was once caught in a 2-hour traffic jam and missed my flight from Schipol airport by like 5 minutes. (We left really early and inspite of this still missed the bloody flight!). I had to buy another ticket to Frankfurt($400) Thank goodness there was a flight 20 minutes later otherwise I would've missed my connection to Osaka!

On my first trip to Greece, we were on Santorini and were trying to get a flight back to Athens. We were informed there was a pilot strike(when is there NOT a strike in Greece!) and we tried several agencies and they put us on waiting lists and told us to check back in a day or two. Thank goodness we had 4 days on the island. On the last day, one agent said there was a charter flight that we could take if we wanted and we jumped at the chance. It was a great little 12-seater and we could get a very close topographical view of the islands in the Agean. Most of all, we were lucky to get that flight!