Europe

Well, today was just one of those days when things don’t work out as planned.

We were up very early (around 5:00 am!) so we could have a leisurely breakfast and pack before leaving for the airport to fly to Dublin. Breakfast arrived right on the dot of 6:15 am (as requested). We probably over-indulged a little but it was very enjoyable.

After breakfast we headed downstairs, where we had a taxi waiting to take us to the airport. We left right on time, at 7am (after taking a picture of the lovely breakfast room at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée).

We were surprised by how heavy the traffic was for a Sunday morning. Our taxi driver dropped us a little way away from where we needed to check in because the traffic was so bad, so we had a short walk to the check-in desk. We checked in without any issue and proceeded to immigration. The line was long but we were in no hurry because we still had plenty of time. After passing through immigration we hopped on the airport train to get to our boarding gate. Once off the train we had to pass through security. The security staff were intent on having us unpack everything from our bags into trays. We commented to each other on the ridiculous number of trays we had to use just to get through security. Once we passed through security, we were hustled away from the screening machine to re-pack our bags. We then headed for the gate. Our gate changed numerous times while we were waiting so we kept a close watch on where we had to be. Once we were pretty confident that we were at the final gate, we lined up in plenty of time to board our Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. But just as the boarding started, we realised that we did not have our camera with us! We quickly started retracing our steps between the various boarding gates but couldn’t find it. We tried calling the lost-and-found number but nobody answered. In the end, we were faced with the choice of boarding without the camera or having our luggage offloaded and staying behind to see if we could find the camera. We reasoned that since there were three more flights to Dublin today, we could look around and re-book onto the next flight.

After looking around the gate areas we went back to the security screening area. And sitting there in a tray was the camera. It seems that the staff had taken it out of the line of trays (maybe to look at it a bit closer) and it didn’t come out of the scanner with the rest of our trays. As we were re-packing, we were moved away from the conveyer belt carrying the trays and didn’t notice that the camera had not come through. So, with the camera back in our possession, that was one problem solved. The next issue was getting our suitcases, which were off-loaded because we didn’t board our flight. We were told that our suitcases would appear on one of the baggage carousels in the arrivals area. But to get to the baggage area, we had to first clear immigration. We did this and wasted the best part of an hour locating our suitcases.

Once we had our suitcases, we headed upstairs to get onto the next flight. However, there was only three minutes left before boarding closed for that flight and even though there were two seats available, we were told that our luggage would not make it onto the flight. So we decided that we’d have to take the next flight, some seven hours after our original flight. But the staff at the check-in desk couldn’t book us onto the later flight and advised us to phone the ticketing desk. That sounded easy enough but we wasted hours trying to get through. Eventually, we started calling the Aer Lingus contact number in every country we could find. We eventually got through to the Luxembourg call centre, who advised that not only were all flights booked out until 10 pm the next night, we now had no tickets because we were considered a “no show” for our flight and our tickets were now void. By this stage we needed some comfort food, so we grabbed a macaron each to keep us going!

We spent the next few hours on the phone to American Express in London, trying to find a way to get to Dublin. It is difficult to believe that in an airport as busy as Charles de Gaulle, it was not possible to get a flight to somewhere as relatively simple as Dublin. But the combination of high travel demand, under-staffing, call centres that don’t answer, cancelled flights, IT failures, and staff who are powerless to do anything (even if they want to) means that something as simple as just re-booking onto the next flight is now a major exercise. We managed to locate a flight through Lisbon but we had to pass it up because it left from a terminal too far away for us to get to in time. We then looked at flying via London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich, Copenhagen, and probably a dozen other cities. We considered driving to Lyon (about five hours away), London (about seven hours with the added complexity of putting the car on a train to go through the channel tunnel), and driving to Zurich (at least eight hours away), just to get on a flight to Dublin. After nearly ten hours, we ended up finding a flight from Heathrow to Dublin tomorrow morning, which meant that we just had to find a way to get to Heathrow before then. We managed to get two tickets on the Eurostar to London, which meant getting back into a taxi and driving back through the Paris traffic to Gare du Nord. We boarded the Eurostar around 7 pm for the journey of around two and a quarter hours to London.

With the timezone change, it was around 8:30 pm when we arrived at St. Pancras Station in London. We exited the station and expected to just jump in a taxi for the ride out to Heathrow. However, taxis turned out to be in short supply and we waited for about half an hour in line to get one. It was after 9:00 pm by the time we got on our way to Heathrow, where we had booked into the Hilton Garden Inn for the night. We expected that the trip to the airport should take around half an hour on a Sunday night. But the M4 was closed for roadworks and we got stuck in a huge traffic jam, turning the trip into an hour-and-a-half crawl, with a fare of £100 adding insult to injury. Our cab driver dropped us off at the hotel door and after a lot of mucking around trying to get his payment machine to work, we went inside to check-in. We were relieved to finally be at our hotel. Except we weren’t! The reception staff informed us that there are, in fact, three Hilton Garden Inn hotels at Heathrow and the one we were booked into was some distance away! So, the hotel reception manager offered to call us a taxi, which he said would take 15-20 minutes to arrive.

A car did arrive after more than 30 minutes but it was not a taxi. It had no signage and no meter. By this stage we didn’t care and, in the full knowledge that we were probably being touched up on the price, we drove to the correct hotel. We checked in and went up to our room, by this stage having spent nearly 18 hours and thousands of dollars just to get about halfway to where we were meant to be about 12 hours ago. All in all, a very frustrating (and expensive!) day.

Hopefully the process of getting on tomorrow’s flight to Dublin turns out to be far less adventurous than what we have experienced today! But, for now, it’s off to bed for a short sleep after a very long day.