KLM / Sabena cock-up
A few years ago, me and mr b3th went to Berlin for a little holiday. As this was before the days when Easjet flew to Berlin, we had to find cheap flights with someone else - and settled on Sabena (the Belgian airline).

I booked flights from Bristol via Brussels, with about an hour between the two flights. Since it takes approximately two hours to walk from one end of Brussels airport to the other, this was possibly not my cleverest idea. Obviously we missed our connection, and had to wait about six hours for the next one.

On the way back, we were waiting at Berlin Templehof (as mentioned before somewhere, it's basically a hangar with communist tendencies - no shops, just one manky cafe and a small waiting room).

So, sitting in the small waiting room, we suddenly hear "will mr and mrs b3th please come to the check in desk?". Filled with trepidation, we turn up, to be told that we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of making our Brussels connection, and Sabena are refusing to fly us. Instead, says the nice lady with the humour deficiency, we have to leg it to one of the other airports in Berlin (the big one, I forget what it's called) and fly with KLM via Schipol.

Fair enough. Except that leaves us with about ten minutes to get all the way across Berlin in rush hour traffic. We made it (just) and then had to argue with the KLM johnnies that our Sabena tickets actually were valid, and they really were expecting us, honest.

So, true to form, we get to Schipol and are refused entry on the connection, as our original tickets were via Brussels. Then it gets fun....

KLM refused to help us further as our tickets were with Sabena.

Sabena refused to help us as they had basically palmed us off on KLM.

I swear to god, this poor rep from Sabena spent THREE HOURS running from one desk to the other (on opposite sides of the huge departure area, obviously) trying to sort it out, while mr b3th and I were reduced to gibbering (tired and hungry) wrecks collapsed on the floor.

Eventually KLM lost and had to put us up in a hotel for the night, then fly us home in the morning. I got my first ever 5 star hotel visit, and I had veal for dinner.

From Schipol to Bristol the next day, KLM decided the easiest route was via Dublin! Fucking DUBLIN!!! Arsemonkeys. And the whole way I had to listen to mr b3th whinging about it being my fault for booking the tickets in the first place. And of course, because our luggage had gone straight from Berlin to Bristol, we had no clean changes of underwear etc, so I spent the whole time worrying about personal hygeine.

Thank you. I feel better for that.
( b3th Not shit. Not mod., Wed 8 Mar 2006, 14:16, Reply)