This is a short post devoted entirely to complaining. Dear gentle reader, we're sure that you want to hear about the moments when traveling is not a pleasure and things do not go to plan.
Our flight from Lisbon to Marseille was full of drama. It kept being delayed until, two hours after the scheduled departure time, we received an email saying that we had been taken off the flight and would be flying to Marseille the next day, with a different airline (Iberian), via Madrid and with only a one-hour layover.
As we could see that the flight was still scheduled to depart – at some time – we found a TAP representative who told us that the flight had been over booked and that we had been kicked off. Never mind that we’d booked 8 months earlier and had had allocated seats since then. There was nothing we could do – and furthermore – we should go back to the check-in area ourselves and make sure that Iberian knew that they would be transporting us and our luggage. Yes – this was apparently our responsibility. Hotel, taxi and food vouchers were produced in a flurry.
We realised that we were clearly getting nowhere, so we decided that we would check with Iberian and keep looking for other people to complain to.
Of course – there was no one to talk to at the Iberian Check-In counter, but we eventually found a TAP Complaints Office. We had to take a ticket and then find a completely different office around the corner once our number came up. But then we found someone who was actually helpful. She told us that it looked wrong that we had been taken off the flight. She started making phone calls and tapping away at her computer and – after 15 minutes – she said: you’re back on the flight but we have to run. She whisked us through an express security lane and we managed to get to the boarding gate before boarding started.
There was commotion at the boarding gate because a couple – who we think had also been kicked off the flight – were trying to hold everyone up from boarding. There were threats to call the police before they finally moved away. We kept our heads down and our boarding passes were accepted. But then we all had to wait in buses on the tarmac for 10 minutes before boarding the plane. We refused to believe that we had made the flight until we were finally sitting in our seats – which were the ones we’d been allocated all those months ago.
Although we made the flight – alas our bags did not. As we had rushed through security for the second time Dale had called out to our wonder service assistant saviour – ‘’what about our bags?’’. She yelled back: ‘’I’ll do what I can”.
In the end, we arrived in Marseilles 5 and a half hours late, it was 11pm and our luggage was not there. Naturally – there is no one you can talk to about delayed luggage. In today’s world you must scan the QR code and do all the work yourself: providing photos of luggage tags and receipts (but you need to make sure the file size is not too large) and descriptions of the luggage.
We had until midnight to pick up our hire car and we made it by the skin of our teeth.
We finally made it to Buis after 1am. Pointing out that the public lighting all gets turned off at 11pm. Luckily we know Buis well and were able to find and get into our rented apartment.
The luggage did eventually arrive in Marseille two days later and we had to drive an hour and a half there and back to collect it. We could have asked them to deliver it to Buis but this would have involved a whole lot of other complications and we had totally lost faith in TAP.
Our other gripe is that when you log your delayed luggage information, you are told you can track the progress of your claim. But you only get an update when they find the luggage and then when it arrives in the destination airport. So you basically go 24 hours without knowing anything. So – I made three calls to TAP’s help desk and was able to get some more meaningful updates – which were still odd. E.g. we have a possible match on your bags and if this is confirmed they will be on a flight to Marseille tomorrow. At least they were able to confirm during the third call that the bags were on a flight and were able to give me the arrival time of the flight. Of course, none of this information was available on the app.
Finally – good news – we got the bags in time to get all our hiking gear and head out on the Thursday full day hike with Randouveze.
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