A bad start

My bags had been packed and repacked, my ticket, passport and documents had been checked and rechecked, and now it was time to head off on an adventure. I was flying from Edinburgh via Dublin to San Francisco to spend a couple of days with Meg & her husband Chris (whom I had never met) before travelling with them and some of their friends to Yosemite National Park for a few days hiking, then back to San Francisco for a few days doing tourist stuff.

I had met Meg on the Via De La Plata in Spain in 2022 and we had become friends, and I had sort of invited myself to come to the USA to visit her, not knowing if it would ever actually happen. Yet here I was on the 2nd of August 2023 at 0430 awake and getting ready to head to the airport for the first leg of my flight to San Francisco.

Barbara dropped me off at the airport at 0640 and I checked in my bag and got through customs in no time at all, I just had to sit around for ages waiting for the departure gate to be announced. Eventually, it was announced and I made my way to the departure gate and boarded with the other passengers.

We sat on the aircraft and waited...and waited, eventually the Captain announced that there was a slight technical fault with the aircraft and that an engineer was working on the problem at that moment. It turned out that the windscreen wipers were not working (unusually for Scotland, it was raining). We waited...and waited. After being on the aircraft for almost 2 hours, the announcement that I had been expecting for two hours came that the windscreen wiper motor needed to be replaced and that the part would have to come from Dublin and so we were to disembark and wait at the departure gate for more information.

I had a 3-hour window to catch my connecting flight in Dublin, but an hour of that had already gone and I was very concerned that I might miss it. My concern turned to resignation when it became clear that the flight to Dublin was cancelled and no Aer Lingus or Swissport (airport logistics) staff could be found to give us any information. It seemed that no Swissport supervisors were answering their phones and none could be found to come and speak to us. As for Aer Lingus staff, I can only assume that they had all fled the country. I actually felt sorry for the Swissport staff who were doing the best the could for us but who had also very obviously been left to deal with it by management.

Some of the American passengers, obviously seasoned travellers with good credit ratings, (mostly golfers - they had all checked in huge golf club bags - began organising other flights. The rest of us poor folks had to wait...and wait...and wait. Eventually, one of the Swissport staff said they had no idea what was happening with alternative flights etc, but that they could see on their system that our baggage was to be removed from the aircraft and she suggested that we go to the domestic flights baggage reclaim to collect them.

By this time the Americans had all headed off to get their new flights and the rest of us headed off to collect our bags. We arrived at the baggage reclaim and waited...and waited...and waited, (by now reader, you must be sensing a theme developing). 2 hours later one of the passengers said that according to her Apple Tag, our bags were still on the aircraft, so we took turns at politely but firmly harassing every member of management who had the misfortune to walk through the baggage reclaim hall.

Meanwhile, some passengers tried to phone Aer Lingus customer service (although based on our experience the phrase 'Aer Lingus customer service' is an oxymoron). At 2pm one gentleman from Glasgow who had been heading to Boston to visit his son managed to get through and was told that he and his wife had been booked onto a 1pm flight to Orlando where they would get a connection to Boston. He said to the CSA that he couldn't be on that flight, the CSA responded that he was definitely booked on that flight. (You can see where this is going right?) He then pointed out that it was 2pm and the flight had (probably) left and hour earlier. Furthermore, even if Aer Lingus had bothered to inform him that they had booked him on that flight, which they hadn't, he was still stuck in baggage reclaim waiting for his suitcase. Then, like Aer Lingus' hope that he would fly with them again, the phone line went dead.

In another twist it turned out that all the Americans who had booked other flights had also missed them as, in what was to them a huge surprise, they were unable to get their baggage off the aircraft we had vacated about 4 hours earlier.

I also managed to get through to Aer Lingus customer service and they told me the next available flight was at the same time tomorrow, I said, OK, at which point the line went dead - the mobile signal in the baggage reclaim was bad, and when I got a signal again the number just kept ringing out. However, according to the otherwise quite useless Aer Lingus App, I had been booked on the flight for the following day. The only thing was I didn't have a ticket for that, however, Hays Travel whom I had booked my flights through, were great and they managed to get me an updated one which they emailed to me directly - now that's customer service.

Our polite but firm harassing of the Swissport management seemed to have worked as the Apple Tag, and hopefully the luggage it was attached to, began to move in our direction, and within 20 minutes our bags had been delivered.

I phoned Barbara and waited at the pick up point for her to collect me, and 10 hours after I first arrived at Edinburgh Airport, I was back home, no further forward.

It was a bad start to what was meant to be the trip of a lifetime.En savoir plus