Airline companies are utter

[Danners9]

I sympathize Chich. Poor form. And I think Crawley's explanation makes sense, however I did aways think that your seat was guaranteed as long as you arrived at the gate within a certain amount of time, even on transfers. Sounds to me like a combination of poor luck and the dreaded overbooking. I agree with the postee who discussed not screaming at the front line folks; I've always got much much more from being wholly empathetic to their plight and also not getting steamed up...

I had a flight from Sri Lanka to Bahrain to Heathrow, quite a long way. We arrived in Bahrain for our 2hr layover to find the onward flight had been overbooked by 60% they told us and we'd been bumped.

Bumped from a transfer?! we went into a rage. Our luggage was meant to go straight to London and we wouldn't see it again until then. They searched for the next available flight, not one later that day or the next morning and the next evening was also full. A day in Bahrain with no luggage and no confirmed plans? err. After much complaining, anger and some well placed phone calls to strategic friends in Bahrain, we got an offer of a hotel room for the day or $50 each in compo.. ooh, $50...!!!!

In the end we took the cheque, had a day in Bahrain with friends, stayed with them so no need for the hotel, got the luggage offloaded and managed to find a way onto that next evening flight. They really f'd up. It wasn't a 'casual' flight to London, it was part of a larger and quite expensive trip. Whoever did the booking in Sri Lanka didn't specify on the system that it Bahrain was a stopover so the system showed there were 2 separate flights.

It was with Gulf Air. Nice food, ****py service. Oh, and the $50 voucher took a month to be processed back in London.

 

[P.D.]

All the people that mention they fly long haul a lot I presume this is with work. What jobs do you all do? Would love a job that involves some nice business class travel.