Should you and I ever meet at an airport departure gate, I will be the one hanging back to be the last on board: I prefer to spend as little time as possible inside a metal tube.
For my easyJet flight from London Gatwick to Athens before dawn on Tuesday, I went through the passport-plus-boarding-pass check and perched on a bench. Exactly half an hour before departure, the ground staff closed the gate and asked me to line up for boarding; I am not sure if anyone was left behind.
Once on board, the aircraft door was closed 17 minutes before the official departure time. We were then told that we would be waiting for an extra 20 minutes for our assigned departure slot. Time to reflect on a relevant question I received from a reader named Sarah.
“I arrived at Gatwick airport for an evening flight to Milan,” she writes. “I wasn’t at all surprised to see a delay on the screen of 45 minutes. Knowing that I had to be at the gate half an hour beforehand, I stayed in the lounge and timed my arrival at the gate for the time the plane was supposed to leave. Given the delay, that should have been in plenty of time.”
But to Sarah’s horror, she arrived at the departure area to find the boarding gate closed. “The plane was still there but the staff wouldn’t let me through.”
A new flight the next morning and an off-airport hotel cost an extra £200. “Who’s responsible: the airport or the airline? Or should I claim on my travel insurance?”
I have had a near-identical experience at Heathrow. My flight was shown as an hour late. I had been keeping an eye on the departure screen from the lounge. I was alarmed to see it suddenly switch from “Go to gate” to “Final call” and sprinted towards the gate. Unfortunately, at the time there was a weird second security check along the way. That consumed enough precious minutes for me to miss the flight. As with Sarah, it was frustrating and expensive. But getting any recompense proved impossible.
The airport is definitely in the clear: its screens merely pass on the information the airline provides to it. But that does not mean you can claim against the airline, citing misleading advice. The information shown on the screen is little more than a “best guess”.
As many travellers wearily recognise, a flight initially shown as one hour late all too often…
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