I've often heard stories about people being delayed on long-haul flights. These always seem to have cheery endings, with the airline forking out a handsome sum so you don't blacken its name to your friends. But as I discovered, this is not always the case. In our household, Gulf Air not the flavour of the month.
Thursday January 6, Kathmandu airport
My boyfriend, James, and I are returning home after spending the new year in Nepal. At 6pm, we get to the airport for the 8.30pm flight to Heathrow, via Bahrain. Immediately, we are told the flight has been cancelled "for technical reasons". We are sent to the Annapurna hotel, and told that we will be flying at 5pm tomorrow.
Friday January 7
At 2pm a bus takes us to the airport. The check-in process is slow: there are two Gulf Air staff, hundreds of passengers, and no computers. Eventually, we check our bags through to London and go through immigration, where we are stamped out of Nepal. We spend our last 90 rupees in the departure lounge.
Ominously, the flight is not on the departure board, and, sure enough, at 4.45am it is cancelled again. The immigration men smile as they scribble out our exit stamps. At the Gulf Air desk, the defensive customer services manager is besieged.
Saturday January 8
We change a £5 note and so manage to avoid a sixth consecutive hotel buffet. Five pounds goes a long way in Kathmandu. However, we spend most of the day sitting in the hotel foyer, waiting for Gulf to decide to take us back to the airport. The familiar journey to the airport reminds us of Groundhog Day.
After several hours, astonishingly, we board a plane. It is a scheduled flight, and half the passengers have been bumped off in our honour. At take-off, a resounding cheer goes up. At 11pm we land in Abu Dhabi. Although we were assured of a connection to London, the staff here know nothing about us, and the London flight is already overbooked. The Gulf staff go out of their way not to make eye contact. The London flight leaves with none of us aboard.
The staff at the airport transfer desk try to get us onto other flights, although they are booked up throughout the next day. We try to buy first-class tickets, but even these are unavailable. By our body clocks it is about five in the morning, but Gulf does not break its silence to offer accommodation. Several passengers are crying with exhaustion. One woman is on her way to London for a kidney operation; she can barely stand up.
KLM has some spare seats on a flight to Amsterdam. A smiling woman takes eight passports. Ours are not among them. As James is holding them out in desperation, her walkie-talkie tells her to take two more. Thus we are among the lucky few, and board the 2.30am flight to Holland. The captain makes an announcement. "You may have noticed," he says, "that we are nine minutes late. We will take off in a further seven minutes." We are relieved, and go to sleep.
Sunday January 9
8.30am: At Schiphol Airport, KLM says it can't take us on to London without authorisation from Gulf Air. There is no one from Gulf here. All we want to do is to go home: there is clearly no option but to buy our own tickets, for £115 each, and get the money back later. We catch the next flight to Heathrow and arrive home 51 hours late to face a backlog of work and missed appointments.
But at least, we thought, we're in line for a compensation payment. I wrote to Mrs Patel, Gulf's customer service manager in London, outlining the entire miserable fiasco. A letter came back from Mohammed Al Shafie of the customer relations and quality standards department in Bahrain, agreeing to refund the cost of the tickets from Amsterdam, but overlooking my suggestions that a refund of the entire £735 each we paid for the Gulf flights might be in order.
Now, three months on, we have yet to be repaid even for the KLM tickets. James has spoken on a weekly basis to Mrs Patel, who has decided that KLM, not Gulf, must refund the cost, and tells us that we should not have bought these tickets in the first place (should we have set up home in Amsterdam, perhaps?) and has now explicitly told us that she doesn't care and washed her hands of us entirely.
"I can't understand what else you want me to do for you," she told James last week, before giving him KLM's number in Amsterdam and leaving us to it.
When I flew to Boston recently, Virgin had overbooked the plane, and offered £300 cash, or a Virgin ticket to anywhere, to anyone who would stay at a hotel and fly the following day.
"We sincerely hope," the letter from Gulf Air's Mr Al Shafie concluded cheerfully, "you will find our services entirely satisfactory when you next travel with us." Does he honestly believe there will be a next time?
• The following airlines also fly from London to Kathmandu: Qatar, Austrian Airlines, Thai Air, Eva Air, British Airways, Qantas and SAS.
