I'm not long back from my second UEFA European Championships in France, and while there were some fantastic moments, the overall experience has left me feeling wanting as right from the very beginning, my travel plans were disrupted.
I arrived in Dublin airport on Saturday, 11th June in plenty of time for my flight to London's Heathrow, where a connecting flight would bring me back to Paris for the first time since 2009. However, the plane itself couldn't match my punctuality. A rare June afternoon fog meant the aircraft didn't leave until two hours after the scheduled time. These things happen to flights, and it meant I could watch the first test between Ireland and South Africa on the iPad of a player from the Dublin Rebels American Football team, who was sitting beside me. While we were still in the air, the pilot had told us that Heathrow was aware of the delay, and that the connecting flight would be held for us. However this was not the case as the gate was closed in front of us, despite a desk being opened for the Paris passengers. The plane itself was still in Heathrow, was still on the tarmac, and indeed had not complete boarding. The unfortunate official at the gate had to contend with about 20 stranded Ireland fans, with no idea who to speak to. To compound the issue, the flight had been booked with British Airways, but the flight itself was handled by Aer Lingus, so the BA official in front of us didn't have any information. The group decided to stay together, and try to get some answers.
Two hours later, after some false starts, and missteps, we found ourselves at the Aer Lingus desk dealing with a manager who didn't want to know about us, and had no inclination to help us either. Fortunately, one of our group was a manager in Dublin Airport, and was duly delegated to speak on our behalf, knowing full well the right questions to ask and exactly what the airline were bound by law to provide for us. An initial solution to take us by bus to Birmingham for a flight, with the possibility of a return to Heathrow should that fail placated the mob, but while we waited for said bus we were called back to the desk to find that the national airline had agreed to put us up in the hotel in Heathrow and supply us with room service if we would return when the desk opened at 5am the next morning. So, as the clocks approached midnight, we decamped to the hotel for the briefest of stays.
At five bells the next morning we reconvened in the lobby to return to the desk. I was at the head of the queue when the lady at the desk asked for a passport, to allow her to access the system. We were told that we would be dealt with in ones, and twos, so when she found a single seat on a 1:30 BA flight, I told her to book it for me. At 9am, there was little point in doing anything other than getting some breakfast back in the hotel, where we met some more travelers from our delayed flight, three girls on the trip of a lifetime to Bali. Which they missed. While we were facing a minor delay in our trip, they were facing rebooking flights to Indonesia, and being out of pocket for the longest part of their journey. Following breakfast, I returned to the departure lounge to wait for my gate to open, so I could check in and continue on to the city of lights.
One uncomfortable hour long snooze later, I woke to find that while the gate had opened, and I could check in, the flight itself had been delayed by a half hour. Considering what I had gone though, I could handle another delay, and I was pleased to see that the same Dublin airport manager that had argued so successfully on our behalf had also been placed on the same flight. Two more of the original group joined us in the boarding queue. They had been originally booked on to a later afternoon flight, but when checking in found that one had been booked under another name, and to compound the mistake the booking was in a woman's name, and the other had been booked on a flight that had left 24 hours earlier! Luckily two more seats on the same BA flight had gone unclaimed, so they had been added to the flight roster. When we were finally in the air, I noticed that, despite our group's need for seats, there were still three empty seats at the back of the plane.
The flight itself was uneventful, other than the delay, and I finally arrived in Paris 26 hours after arriving in Dublin Airport. I estimate that, assuming no delays, I could easily have made it to New Zealand in the same timeframe.
The three empty seats on the flight were made all the more galling when, at the Sweden game in the Stade de France on Monday evening, I found myself in the same row as two of the same group. They had been booked on to a late evening flight from Heathrow, but when arriving to check in, found no record of their booking, resulting in a chase across London to St Pancras station to purchase two Eurostar tickets to Paris at a cost of STG£180, and at their own expense, although there was an agreement in place with the airline to compensate them for the cost in due course.
So, with the start of my journey ended, I had assumed that I had paid my dues up front, and the karma banked with the universe would mean the rest of my travel plans would proceed as planned. Not so.
Part two is here: "when one train vanishes, another turns into a bus".
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