A few years ago, I was traveling home hoping to visit my family. It was a direct flight, about ninety minutes, early in the morning. Due to unusual foggy weather, we could not land. Since my hometown rarely had issues, the pilot believed it would clear and kept flying around waiting for it to be safe.
It didn’t happen, and by the time they gave up, we didn’t have enough fuel to go all the way back, so they took us to the biggest airport in the country, around halfway between the two towns. There, they assured us, we would be taken care of and boarded onto a plane the second the weather cleared.
When we got there, however, the crew from our plane disappeared, and the airport employees had no idea we were even coming. Nothing was communicated to them, and they looked lost and panicky. They were certain, though, that it was impossible for them to just come up with a plane to take us to our destination, and they would have to find some alternative.
They put us in a corner of the airport — not in any specific room, just an area not being used at the time. I was sitting on one of the conveyor belts behind a check-in counter because there were not enough seats for everyone and there were a lot of older people.
After some arguing, the staff gave us vouchers for food that barely covered anything in the overpriced airport restaurants. We asked for our luggage so we could get toothbrushes, changes of clothes, deodorant, etc. We had been there for about three hours already. They said it was impossible to locate our luggage at the moment, but we could see it in a corner behind them, and we pointed it out. They said that corporate policy prevented them from giving us our luggage. It took a lot of arguing from some of the loudest passengers for them to allow us a moment to go to our luggage and get whatever we needed.
When the four-hour mark hit and we had no information on what would happen to us, we went back to hunt an employee and demand some solution — put us in a hotel, take us back home, do something. They just repeated the same thing, over and over: they were doing their best to accommodate us, but there was no solution at the moment because all the flights were full.
I asked if they could provide us with a bus. It was a six-hour trip, more or less, to either of the cities. It had been way more than that since we’d left our homes. They said they would check, and thirty minutes later, they said it was possible and they only needed to know who would go to which city and who would rather wait.
Relieved, we gave them our information and waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently, the traffic was terrible and the buses were stuck. It took over two hours for them to get there. No second voucher for food was provided, although we got some water, at least.
When they actually showed up, we found out that the company had messed up the number of people who would go to each city. That meant that people going back to where we started had to be cramped up with no seats left, while people moving on to our original destination had two full buses with not enough people to fill even one. I got lucky and was on the latter, so I was able to sleep all the way through using two seats.
I could have sued. They broke so many laws with the lack of support they gave us that it would have been an easy case. I decided not to; I didn’t want to spend more time and energy on it.
The thing is, I ended up working for that company. There, I found out that they had meticulously calculated how much it costs to follow the law versus how much it would cost in lawsuits and how many people are likely to go to court. If it’s cheaper to follow the law, they do it. If not, they’d rather keep their passengers hanging.
