ABU DHABI // A British tourist stranded in Thailand since Saturday because of fog at Abu Dhabi International Airport is finally flying home tomorrow – with an upgrade to business class.
Wayne Duncan, 30, has been waiting for a flight out of Bangkok despite explaining his plight to Etihad Airways staff in Abu Dhabi and Thailand, and via social media. He spent 10 hours on the phone with Etihad and made four trips to the airport while waiting for a replacement flight to Manchester via Abu Dhabi after the flight on Saturday was cancelled. He was not given hotel accommodation.
Mr Duncan said Etihad staff told him three times that he had been booked on different flights, but each time he arrived at the airport in Bangkok he found he did not have a seat on the plane.
On the third occasion he was told he was on a flight due to leave on Friday. “Today I woke up a little bit early and thought I’d put in a quick call to Etihad just to triple check that this flight was absolutely OK,” he said on Wednesday. But a representative at the contact centre knew nothing about the booking, and told him the plane was full and that he was not on it.
After The National contacted Etihad about passengers such as Mr Duncan who still faced delays, he said he had been booked on a flight in business class for Friday.
Other passengers have described waiting for days to leave Thailand on Etihad flights. Some wrote to the airline using its Facebook page to say that they had given up waiting in Bangkok and Phuket, and had bought new tickets to their destinations.
Fabian Namgalies, 36, a German resident of San Francisco, had waited in Phuket for about 30 hours before he booked another flight home via Abu Dhabi on Monday.
The flight cost US$2,500 (Dh9,181), $1,000 more than his original ticket.
Mr Namgalies has yet to inform Etihad that he has left Thailand, and by Wednesday he had yet to receive word from the airline about another flight. “If I had not booked the flight, I would still be in Phuket,” he said.
Mr Namgalies said he had heard that Etihad was a good airline, but he thought there was room for improvement after his experience.
“It’s just that the crisis management and the communications were very weak,” he said.
Etihad is the anchor airline of Abu Dhabi International Airport, and it suffered the brunt of the severe fog that covered the city on Saturday morning.
The airport was temporarily closed and 20 flights, all Etihad’s, were cancelled and others delayed.
The airline had said it was expecting a normal flight schedule to resume on Tuesday and was operating four relief flights, two of which were to Bangkok and Phuket. A spokesman said on Wednesday that most, if not all, delayed passengers had now been scheduled to fly out of Thailand.
Operations at the airport must cease when visibility is reduced to less than 100 metres. Fog at the airport has been causing similarly poor visibility on an average of six days a year since 1982.
lcarroll@thenational.ae
