This is a multi purpose trip, 50 years ago in June I graduated from Air the Traffic Control College , so we decided a reunion was in order, it seemed a waste of an opportunity just to visit the UK, so we booked a cruise to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. If that wasn’t enough we decided we’d stop off in Iceland on the way home.
Well, after last years disaster, this trip is not shaping up too well!! A few months ago we were advised of a schedule change, this change would have given us a 55 minute connection in Toronto. The airline insisted this was perfectly doable. We changed flights despite their assurances, today we proved we were right and they were wrong. Fast forward to a few weeks ago we got notice of another schedule change caused by a flight cancellation. This time they proactively switched us to a new flight. Unfortunately the new flight left Toronto for Ottawa 3 hours BEFORE the flight from Iceland to Toronto landed. They didn’t seem to realise that this was problematic! There was a flight with a different airline that left within 5 minutes of the cancelled one, but there was no way they wer going to book us on that. They offered a flight 24 hour later as the best solution! After 3 or 4 phone call arguing the stupidity of their solution solving they came up with a new flight. Iceland to Calgary to Ottawa. Twice the distance and twice the time. Enough was enough, I cancelled the last leg, booked a new one myself, and with the refund money made about $200 profit and still flew Business class!
Fast forward to Toronto airport, cleared security and ready to go to the lounge, whoops one boarding pass missing. I left Lyn to check in to the lounge with her pass and I went back to security as I thought I’d lost it there. Wrong, not there. Mybe it got put in my backpack after security, unusual as I always keep my pass in my passport. Back to the lounge, sweet talk my way in as I had no boarding pass. Found Lyn andstarted hunting boarding passes. I checked the pssport I had…. it was Lyns. Checked the other passport, it was mine with my boarding pass! Lyn had managed to get into the lounge on my pass.
OK what to do about the missing pass, couldn’t easily go to the airline desk as it was back through immigration which would be a pain to try. Had an old age brainwave, what would happen if I re-checked in on the phone? Well, it worked and gave us electronic boarding passes. Problem solved. Now we have to wait as the flight has been delayed by an hour. Let’s hope this is only a one hour delay this time.
Well we have arrived in Iceland, cool and damp! It’s a bit of an odd layout here, and coupled with the new EU rules with entry/exit tracking we were expecting delays. Before we left the aircraft we were told that passengers connecting to the UK or Ireland should stay in the D gate area and would not need to go through passport control…. bonus!! However when we go to the terminal we were tod that the lounge was in the A gate area and if we wanted to use it we would have to clear passport control. As we had a three hour layover we decided to risk it. We got to the passport control and there must have been 2 hundred automatic machines there, together with 6 passport officers in case of problems. There were 200 problems, not one of the machines was in service. It wasn’t too bad and we made it to the lounge. That’s enough for today, the next entry should be from the UK and hopefully the end of my negativity!!!