What's the worst layover you've ever had? Pic rel is me rn, stuck in detroit for the past 36 hours, 3 flights promised and 3 flights canceled along with a hotel voucher promised and not delivered. What's the worst you've ever had?
Worst layovers
What's the worst layover you've ever had? Pic rel is me rn, stuck in detroit for the past 36 hours, 3 flights promised and 3 flights canceled along with a hotel voucher promised and not delivered. What's the worst you've ever had?
Lol, that's DTW alright.
Istanbul. Flight delayed by 24 hours because of snow. Had to wait 7 hours for my free hotel room. Only got 1 meal.
You can't buy food by yourself?
Or a hotel? I'd just leave.
Why are people being such poorgays?
>not having airline status to actually get through to someone on elite line
Paddys day 2007, I was stuck in Dublin airport for 24 hours because there were snowstorms on the east coast in the US.
There were people sleeping everywhere, drunks passed out, it was quite messy.
wtf do you do for 36hrs in a airport, holy shit.
is it even comfortable enough to sleep?
Frankfurt during the last strike
Was supposed to leave on wednesday, learn my flight has been cancelled and I'm rebooked on thursday.
Get to the airport, scan my boarding pass (That I had been given by a service attendant from Lufthansa the day before complete with a seat number), and the machine gives an error message. The stressed out attendant runs it through their system and claims the ticket doesn't exist. Despite telling the woman to go in an just fricking look at my empty seat, they refuse to let me on board and I end up having to go back to the service counter and wait in line for hours to get my hotel for the night and new rebooking.
End up getting rebooked on Saturday, but for whatever reason they can't give me a hotel until then - I actually only get a hotel during the night and have to come back to the airport friday for my other hotel ticket. When I return on friday to retrieve this early in the morning, they tell me these can't be handed out until 15:00 so I have to wait until then and stand in line AGAIN.
So in total ended up spending 96 hours in Frankfurt I hadn't planned on. Trains and buses were booked for days, and the ones that weren't cost more than the entire trip and didn't even get me a seat.
Beijing, 10 hours.
Not the biggest layover ever but because of glorious CCP I couldn't get any internet access, so I basically just walked around for 10 hours being bored out of my mind.
>10 hours in a cool airport
I do this by choice to save a few hundred dollars, perfectly fine with a nice meal and a book / wifi
Coming back from Costa Rica in December 2016 and bought a split ticket from Denver with Frontier. Frontier delayed 8 hours, then all of a sudden cancelled the flight and had no availability to rebook people until the 27th (it was like the 19th or something). Claimed to cancel because "inclement weather" but in reality it wasn't bad weather, every other airline was flying no problem it was just cold (maybe 10f). Turns out later it was a pilot scheduling issue from ~~*corporate*~~ they just decided to blame it on weather so as not to have to comp hotel rooms or food. People were screaming at the desk agents for Frontier to the point they both started crying and ran away, felt bad for them.
Ended up hitting up a friend of mine from college who lived there to see if I could crash at his place and he had a guy from my city (Missoula) on his couch already, I didn't give a frick though because I had been in the airport for 20 hours at that point. Turns out that guy was leaving in a couple of days to drive back to MT, so I just rode with him. I lucked out big time. Everyone else in the airport was fricked because all flights were booked with the other carriers back to MT until Christmas. Frick Frontier, worst airline.
Anon, if you have the time leave the airport and go over to the Wheat and Rye. It’s a tavern/bar like 5mins from the airport. Huge ass sandwiches and drinks are pretty cheap. Interesting local crowd too.
My family always goes there whenever one of us flies home.
Iron Mike’s is a little further but they have great burgers there.
Had a 12 hour layover in Londonstan once. Couldn't leave Heathrow, and there was absolutely no place to lay down and rest.
Had a really comfy layover in KL, Malaysia. Air Malaysia gave me a hotel room with meal vouchers for it. I was exhausted but still took the train downtown to see the Petronas Towers, too late to get a ticket to go up tho. The food was good and I had a nice nap. Only sad part was that some local on the train wanted to talk to me, and I was too exhausted to say anything, so he probably thought I was a jerk.
Munich airport, 2017. 6 hour layover coming from Russia, toward Italy. The Russian plane was 2 hours late, and it caused some chaos in the rescheduling. As soon as we disembarked we were ushered by screaming German attendants into an underground train, which took us to a part of the airport that was owned entirely by Lufthansa (complete with giant flags and symbols everywhere, some things never change).
Anyway it was 9pm and we were told our plane was "being prepared" and to wait. Okay no biggie, but a problem: this part of the airport was closed. All the shops, bars, everything locked up. There was no one else apart from a few dozen passengers and two attendants. The only thing we could buy was coffee from an espresso machine in a far corner (2€ a cup).
I have never seen a closed airport like that in my life. It was a liminal space, a massive emptiness. It made me feel nervous
10 hours at Keflavik Reykjavics airport.
>planned to go into town
>weather is dumping rain and windy
>lay around smallish airport paying 17$ for yogurt, 5$ for a banana etc.
9 hours in Vegas with frontier promising every hour that we were only 30 minutes from boarding.
I’ve told this story before, but I was on a Vietnam Airlines flight from Hanoi to Taipei that had some kind of mechanical problem two hours in and had to turn around and land VERY ROUGHLY back in Hanoi—we were surrounded by fire trucks and other emergency vehicles waaaay out on the tarmac when we came in, because someone was clearly afraid the plane was going to have crashed and exploded.
It’s the middle of the night and the airport is an absolute shitshow of exhausted, disgruntled people, about half of whom are Chinese, pushing, yelling, spitting, and smoking where they’re not supposed to. I finally get word that they are giving me a hotel room, but l have no valid visa for Vietnam, so an immigration officer just confiscates my passport and locks it in her desk. I am then frog-marched backwards through security and loaded into a taxi to arrive at a once-grandiose but crumbling, truly dismal, mosquito-filled hotel in an unpleasant, remote part of town. It looks like the sort of place the Moldovan SSR’s Politburo would have a staff retreat in 1989. I learn that I have been assigned a roommate, a creepy, overly friendly 50something Hmong dude from Sacramento who miiiight have been a human trafficker. I ask the front desk if I can just pay to get a private room. They refuse, and tell me that the hotel is “very expensive.” Worth mentioning at this point that along with my passport, the airport still has my luggage, so I have no change of clothes, nor even a toothbrush (that was my fault); I make due with an abrasive hotel toothbrush and miniature tube of Chinese toothpaste that tastes of petroleum.
I am fed the worst meal I have ever eaten in Vietnam, at a buffet restaurant/banquet hall that has seen better days. The creepy Hmong gentleman is effusive about how good it is. Apart from Vietnam Airlines strandees, the only other guests at the hotel appear to be Aeroflot pilots.
In the morning the hotel yells at me for drinking a beer from the minibar.
The only good part of the whole experience was that I talked the VN Airlines ground agent (the poor fricker had been at the airport all night dealing with people like me, and was still there in the morning) to get me into the lounge to wait for my escape flight. And I obviously got my passport back.
10 hours in a regional mexican airport
It might not sound too bad, but it was a total shitshow
>3 hours in line
>~~*weather*~~ ~~*itinerary change*~~, so most people got fricked as it was not a cancelled flight
>Only 3 people got offered hotel rooms because "That's all we can offer"
>Most people got moved to a flight 2 days later with a 10-hour layover in Tijuana
>Rest had to sleep in the airport, all taxis refused to accept the taxi vouchers, no water, no food
>AC was turned off at midnight, 27° all night
>Doors got locked, so no one could leave after midnight
At least the ones that stayed b***hed for so long the airline had to charter another flight for the next day at 6 am, and we got 2 roundtrip ticket vouchers each, but that was by far my worst experience
Not me. But my dad was once stuck in Chicago with an 11 hour layover because he mistook am for pm
And people miss their plane because they think a 00:10 departure means it will be at 10 minutes past midnight on that date.
i never do layovers or stopovers anymore.
shit is always delayed or some other shit happens.
i either try to fly directly to my destination, or if I cant I stop and stay a night in the airport hotel at whatever midway point I need to stop at
I don't have an interesting story but I want to bump and hear other people's stories. I will say that having a layover at small airports sucks ass (ontario intl airport, LA)