Easy Jet/budget airlines

General Chat
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Warning: minor ranty thread…

As I find myself awaking in a hotel across from Schiphol airport, some 12hrs after I should’ve been home.

Is flying budget airlines problematic when problems occur?

Essentially our flight home was cancelled, no one actually told us. Had to go back through immigration to find their desk in another terminal, with 3 members of staff on it and quite possibly 2 plane loads of people in line.

Fast forward 6hrs of waiting in line without water/food, next direct flight with them is Tuesday or we make our own arrangements and claim. Also booked our own hotel as their app wasn’t working…

Flying back today with KLM to Newcastle to get a train home…

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Budget airlines are great most of the time because things are OK and bearable most of the time but when things go wrong they really go out of control wrong with these airlines because of their obvious cost saving measures like minimum levels of staff etc… Big airlines usually communicate to their customers better but not always.

Personally I would not stop flying to budget airlines because most of the time they perform and cost of travel is always going to be a factor.

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Is this the first bad experience you’ve had with them? Might just be bad luck this time!!

Hope today’s travels go to plan :slight_smile:

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How fitting this has come up :joy:

We (3 of us), landed in Bergen (Norway) on Wednesday, having flown with Norwegian.

1 suitcase didn’t arrive, preferring instead to stay in Gatwick. Not a problem, there was a flight later that day they would put it on, and call us.

As we were doing a road trip, we were staying around 2 hours from Bergen, but heading 4 hours north in the morning.

No answer from anyone on any phone number - All extremely unhelpful.

Thursday came and went - Not a peep. The tracking didn’t update, no one called us, no one answered.

Friday morning, we get told it was indeed flown to Bergen on the same day… oops - Sorry!

They then flew it up to Molde, which was near where we stayed last night (well… 2 hours away, but closer than Bergen).

Then get told by Molde last night “Sorry, we can’t get it to you as you are too far away - We can put it on a bus, and if you wait by X bus stop at 9:45pm, you should be able to get it off”.

Wow… no thanks!

As we are heading down to Oslo today, we’ve asked them to fly it there instead!

So in a nutshell… Budget airlines customer service is terrible.

You quite literally get what you pay for. Just hope nothing goes wrong.

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Worst with any airline… and reading twitter looks like they’ve literally sh*t the bed yesterday and several routes

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There are two types of luggage, carry on and lost - onebag

Since 2004, I’ve flown almost 500k miles just with BA, all with a carryon

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If you are at a ‘base’ airport, then generally they are fine. Best thing to do is just do it yourself and then claim through the airline if it is claimable - or through travel insurance as a ‘travel delay’ cost.

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My only disappointment with BA was last time I flew business… they ran out of all the meat options by the time they reached me :sob:

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That’ll teach you for slumming it :wink:

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Next time I’ll plump for first class :joy:

Funnily… I could get a business class flight home with BA today cheaper than a direct flight economy with KLM to Edinburgh (before it sold out)

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I do enjoy flying BA always feels it runs that bit smoother however their decision to fly all international flights out of Heathrow forcing all us non londeners to make connections really pissed me off.

Sadly I’ve never had the cash lying around to fly anything other than cattle class with them though which may have soured my opinion slightly! :frowning:

Last time I flew to New York I flew Aer Lingus and they were faultless. Couldn’t recommend it more. Yes changing at Dublin is a bit annoying but more than made up by being able to clear US customs there.

In terms of budget flights usually never had too much of an issue although I do try and avoid Ryanair where possible!

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To be fair, the one advantage of flying from Heathrow over Scotland… is the plane stock is usually newer!

Flew AA from Edi to NYC last year and we didn’t even have TVs on the back of the seats, it was in the aisle! Last time I saw one of those setups was in 1996!

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BA have really gone down in my personal rankings, although I trust their safety and training more than most.

But compared to almost any asian airline their service sucks.

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Can’t say I’ve had a bad flight with them yet.

The service level has dropped a bit to compete with budget airlines… wish it wouldn’t

Emirates provided me with the worst service of a big airline.

Heard good things about Qatar

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I fly British Airways pretty much exclusively, and that’s usually 2 international trips a month. I agree, compared to the service on Emirates or Singapore Airlines they are low down but they are almost always helpful with me (though maybe because I’m Gold, I don’t know how much that is a factor) and I trust their safety. Plus it’s direct flights to most places from London rather than a change.

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I won’t use the middle eastern airlines, refuse to support such odious regimes.

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I’m going to bow out of this discussion I’m way out of my depth here. Consider my lower middle class status revoked :rofl:

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The irony is really that the airlines themselves are made up of such international staff that they are very liberal. The sheer number of overtly gay men who work for Emirates or Qatar that I’ve flown with!

Also even the countries themselves in major cities aren’t reflective of their governments in many places (Dubai and Abu Dhabi for example).

Hate their governments, sure.

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Hahaha, I usually fly economy, work pays for the good stuff :wink:

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My rule now is ‘if you can maintain gold you are flying too much’ - I had gold on all three alliances for a few years, thankfully dropping them now.