Who's The Daddy: A weekend in Madrid turned into a legal masterclass
Urban sophisticates of the North that we are, we’re all well aware that not all airlines are the same. Some treat you like European royalty while to others you’re cargo at best, ballast at worst, to be dumped as an inconvenience at the first sign of trouble.
Sadly for Daughter #1, last week she flew with the latter on a girls’ long weekend to Madrid with a dozen of her closest friends.
Everything was tickety-boo on the flight out as well as the magical days and nights around the rooftop bars and restaurants of the Spanish capital. But it all turned to **** when attempting to board the plane home on the Sunday night when, having paid in full for her ticket, checking in on time and having been allocated a seat, was denied boarding at the gate minutes before departure because the airline had overbooked the flight.
At no point were passengers asked to give up their seats in exchange for compensation, which is the correct step under EU regulation.
Daughter #1 was travelling in a group, but when she requested a moment to discuss the situation with her friends, the airline denied her and immediately separated her from them.
Just to be clear, these young women were calm, weren’t acting out and were a group of model passengers. This happened because the airline sold more tickets than there were seats on the plane, gambled that some passengers wouldn’t turn up, and booted our 25-year-old daughter off the flight almost 1,300 miles from home when they did.
Daughter #1 said staff at the gate were unhelpful, dismissive, displayed no empathy and treated her like an inconvenience. They gave her misleading and incorrect information regarding her rights and told her - wrongly - that if she booked a flight home with a different airline she would forfeit her right to compensation, would not be entitled to hotel accommodation and would not have her expenses reimbursed.
The alternative offered at the desk was a flight the following Friday. Six days later. So this airline left a vulnerable young woman alone in a foreign country at night, treated her like **** and didn’t give her the support she was entitled to.
Daughter #1 called me at her wits’ end from Madrid Airport, I offered to pay for a ticket on the first flight back to England, but her boyfriend had got there first and booked her a seat in the early hours of following morning, via Barcelona, that got her back into Liverpool by Monday lunchtime - after a couple of hours of fitful sleep in a scummy hotel that wasn’t fit for keeping chickens in.
After Daughter #1 had landed, literally and emotionally, she fired off a complaint and compensation claim to the airline, listing by name all of the EU regulations they’d broken and ended by saying: “For hours, I was under the false impression that I would have to personally cover last-minute travel, hotel and other expenses with no reimbursement. This is unacceptable conduct from your staff and a direct breach of your legal obligations.”
Looks like that first in law from Liverpool University three years ago came in handy after all.
To read more Who’s The Daddy click here