I don't easily get stressed on flights, but this one.....
On a work trip I was flying from Oslo to Abu Dhabi via Istanbul, with Turkish Airlines. The flight was one hour delayed from Oslo and as the Turkish pilot made an extra 40 min long detour on the entry to Istanbul.... I was late and missed my connecting plane from Istanbul to Abu Dhabi.
We were 4 Norwegians that suffered the same destiny, and trying to rebook in Istanbul, I have 3 advice: don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.
All four of us ended up on an Emirates plane to Jedda in Saudi Arabia, a city I never heard about before. We landed 1:00 am on a Saturday night on an incredibly crappy airport in the middle of nowhere, and our connecting flight was supposed to be around 07:30 am. Great, this is how we all dreamed about spending a Saturday night
When we got there, we had to get new boarding passes, and while requesting this, the airline official grabbed our passports and just disappared. GREAT, we're in Saudi Arabia without passports, after what seemed like one and a half hour the guy appared with boarding passes and passports... good, only 5 hours till our flight....
There were no proper displays about our gate, or anything....and when we finally found out, it was 400 people in a queue, and all of them were protecting their line in the que like the life was depending on the position, if you were getting to close you would get a sharp elbow in your stomach or a very hard push .... Do people have absolutely no manners around there?
Imagine a full Boeing 777 with people behaving like they never been on a plane before, the whole plane was like a complete disaster zone, extremely noisy, stressful and.... my goodness.... then I was quite happy about my AKG noise cancelling headphones.
Just to complete the madness of the situation, at the same instant as the 777 touched down at the airstrip in Abu Dhabi, while the plane was in full braking mode, people already had jumped up, opened the luggage hatches and started to take out the luggage, the flight attendants were running around shouting and trying to secue the airplane, get people down into the seats and securing luggage. Never seen anything like this ==:-O
I'm not flying ever again via Saudi Arabia if there is any way in the world to avoid it, and I suggest to take care doing stopovers in Jedda
I never imagined business travelling could be anything like this
ps: this is a compressed version of the storyline
