Wedges, Wine and Waiting – The GC Debacle
9 hours locked in the Gold Coast departure lounge, 45 minutes in the food line, middle aged women attempting to smoke cigarettes in the ladies bathroom and getting intoxicated with strangers courtesy of $10 Air Asia vouchers. This was how we spent the 29th December 2009…
We’d decided to spoil ourselves and book a 5 star hotel for our stopover in KL since we were due to arrive at 3pm that afternoon and leave at 1pm the next. What we didn’t know when we booked the hotel is that we’d end up spending more time in the Gold Coast departure lounge than the hotel room…
The day began quite normally, for a departure day at least, we checked in and paid excess baggage for my busting-at-the-seams suitcase, ate an incredibly overpriced and underflavoured airport breakfast, bid a sad farewell to our crying families for the 2nd time, checked out duty free without any interest of purchasing and then took our seats in the boarding lounge.
And that’s when it happened…
The first of approximately 7 delays that would appear on that on that ghastly light board that day in December. In the beginning we were led to believe it was simply delayed because the previous flight was late in from Sydney but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
As 1 hour passed, then another, then another without any explanation we were starting to get slightly antsy. Finally they announced that the plane was unable to land because of bad weather conditions, on the Gold Coast in SUMMER no less!
The next announcement came an hour later when the plane had run out of fuel due to circling for too long and had to go back up to Brisbane to land and refuel.
Another hour passed and Air Asia finally came up with the goods… in the form of $10 vouchers to be spent at the ONE food outlet in the lounge. 45 minutes later and I delivered one bowl of wedges and one bowl of fries to a now considerably antsy Andrew.
By this point they had given up making any announcements and we were 5 hours delayed, bored silly and hearing angry murmurs from passengers all around us who had inevitably missed their connecting flights to their tropical paradise of choice.
Tension was building as we hit the 7 hour mark and, sensing the tension, Air Asia made an announcement – although it wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped – we were receiving another $10 voucher per person. Safe to say, everyones tables were this time laden with alcoholic beverages, not fried goods.
The Air Asia plane we needed to catch (scheduled to arrive at 7:30 that morning) finally touched down, at 4:08pm, amid cheers from the now mildly intoxicated and totally exhausted passengers who were still facing a 9 hour journey to KL, not to mention a day of organizing new flights since hundreds of them had missed their previous connection.
As I dozed off before the plane even left the tarmac, I was silently patting myself on the back that I’d made the choice to book the KL to London flight for the following day – a golden rule of air travel I will continue to follow regardless of the inconvenience stopovers may entail.
Our drawn out departure lounge experience may have faded into a distant airport memory already but Air Asia’s poor performance that day will stick around awhile longer – they didn’t earn a gold star from us that day!
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Fri, Jan 29, 2010
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