Kostya's Boring Codec World

I did not want to have personal rants in my restarted blog but sometimes material just comes and presents itself.

As some of you might know, I prefer travelling by rail; yet sometimes I travel by plane because it’s faster. Most of those flights are semiannual flights to Sweden and an occasional flight to elenril-city. And here’s the list of unpleasant things I had with flights:

• Planes being late for more than an hour (because of technical reasons) — two Lufthansa flights from Arlanda;
• Plane being late just because — Aerosvit, once;
• Baggage not loaded on plane — Cimber Sterling (aka Danish Aerosvit);
• Flights cancelled because of strike — once SAS and once Lufthansa;
• Flight being cancelled because of plane malfunction — Lufthansa once;
• Flight being cancelled because they didn’t want to wait for the passengers — Lufthansa once (yup, people were waiting at the gate but they decided to skip boarding entirely and send the plane away without passengers);
• Flight where I could not check in — Lufthansa once.

To repeat myself, most flights I make during the year are with SAS to/from Sweden though sometimes segment is operated by LH. So far return trips to Frankfurt with LH were mostly okay except for some delays but the last “flight” was something different.

I booked a flight FRA-PRG-FRA. The flight to Praha was cancelled because plane arrived to Frankfurt at least half an hour later than expected and after another hour it was decided it’s not good enough to fly again. Okay. So they could not find a replacement plane and rebooked me to flight at 22:15. Fine, but it turned out that I could reach Praha by train faster and cheaper (twice as cheap actually) so I decided not to wait.

Then the time for return flight came and I could not check in at all because they have modified something (that’s the message: “Cannot check in to your flight because of modifications, refer to Lufthansa counter.” And there’s no LH representative there. And if you can withstand their call centre, you’re a much better person than I am). So it was another train back to Germany (which also broke down in the middle of nowhere but at least it was resolved in an hour and a half). Maybe it’s because of the selected Cattle Lowcostish fare (Economy but without check-in baggage or seat selection) instead of the usual one but at least with SAS when I wasn’t able to take flight to Arlanda (because of Frankfurt Airport staff strike) I still had no problems flying back from there.

Call me picky (and I shan’t argue, I am picky) but I expect better statistics because the most irritating cases were happening with the certain company that I don’t fly with often and that’s comparable with SAS in quantity (but, sadly, not quality).

And that means I’ll avoid using it in the future even if that means not being able to get to some places by plane in reasonable time. There are still trains for me.

P.S. This rant is just to vent off my anger and frustration from the recent experience. And it should make me remember not to take Air Allemagne flights ever again.
P.P.S. Hopefully the next post will be more technical.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2017 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.