After a lovely breakfast which included home-made croissants, we jumped back into our toy-car-convertible and drove to Köln Airport and dropped off the car, and had a nice cruise back through a wonderfully sunny day.
Throughout the weekend there was some pretty desperate sounding emails from Easyjet asking if any passengers would like to travel on a different plane, even offering compensation and a hotel to go on a different day. We didn’t have that option given that Manja had to go back to work, and didn’t WANT that option given that we just had a hassle-filled arrival.
All of this made Manja uneasy, which I assured her was not necessary. But to make her feel better I agreed that we’d try and get on the plane as quickly as possible; meaning that for the first time IN MY LIFE I queued at check-in to be one of the first few people on board. All seemed well, but I started to get suspicious when I saw the plane… Somewhat smaller than expected, and run by WDL Aviation – a company whose slogan could be “Rental planes for when your plane has an issue, customer dissatisfaction guaranteed!”
As it turned out, Manjas concern was totally valid. When we got on the plane, the attendants advised us that today we’d have “Freie Sitzwahl” – meaning “Free choice of seats”. All seat assignments had been removed, it was first in best dressed. We were early enough to get two seats next to each other, and as the plane filled up many grumpy people had to split across the cabin. As we sat down we figured out what was going on.
This was a replacement WDL plane was MUCH SMALLER. Not as many seats. Eventually there was about 10 people standing in the walkway with no seats remaining.
To my amazement the stewardess just announced:
“If you have been unable to find a seat, we must ask you to leave the plane and speak to the ground crew. We apologise for this, but we will be unable to take you on this flight”.
She may have as well said:
“Oh by the way folks, today we’re playing the adult version of musical chairs! Congratulations, if you managed to find a seat you get to go on this flight!”
Sure… All is well now that I have chocolate…
With no other choice the people left, and I was gobsmacked. This seemed like a disaster of logistics to me: It put the people most likely to be extremely annoyed into a confined space with minimal staff. Talk about increasing the risks at work! Surely it would have been better to cancel some tickets and deal with this issue at the gate rather than playing musical chairs on an airplane.
To make matters worse, the crew now had to go through and confirm that every piece of hand-luggage belonged to a passenger. As an apology for the delay and inconvenience they passed out some chocolates.
Well, we were just happy to be on the flight and on the way back. The rest of the trip was totally uneventful, but that story was worth a blog. Once we got back we decided to make use of the last few hours of the day and have a pizza in the park – much needed after all that excitement!
Listening to…
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