This return from Turkey, the passengers of the TUI flight will remember it all their lives. They will have taken 12 hours to return to Birmingham airport, where they ended up trying to open a door to collect their luggage.
The flight which was supposed to last 4 hours will have finally taken 12. A nightmarish situation for all the passengers. Catherine Arnold, 40, and her companion Tom, 41, were traveling on this flight. They still had to wait 4 hours once at the airport to collect their luggage. “We were already delayed by more than 4 hours when we took the flight”, explains Catherine. “The flight attendant came and said we couldn’t go back to Norwich anymore because it was too late at night and we would be diverted to Birmingham. There was a lot of moaning,” she adds.
But the mess didn’t stop there. In addition to being diverted, the passengers encountered problems retrieving their luggage. “When we arrived in Birmingham to pick up our suitcases, the bags didn’t come out. It was horrible because there was no staff. We were stuck in there for a total of four hours, with virtually no communication,” Catherine testifies.
Following a failure, passengers had to wait long hours to retrieve their suitcases. “There was no TUI rep until about 7am and we landed at 3.20am. Everyone was tired and fed up. And there were people with young children, ”explains Catherine. “I saw a woman begging for her baby stroller saying, ‘I don’t care about my bags, please can I just have my stroller? I can’t take it anymore. She had to lay her little one down so that he slept on the floor at the end,” she explains again.
“When we finally got out, we were told there would be buses waiting for us, but when we got out there were only about six taxis. The majority of us stood on the sidewalk for an hour,” says Catherine.
The nerves of the passengers had been so strained that the police had to intervene to try to calm the spirits, we read in the columns of Birmingham Live. After the incident, the airline TUI admitted to having let its passengers down.
“Laughably enough, TUI emailed us apologizing and offering us a £150 voucher on our next TUI holiday, which I took as a kick in the teeth. We will never fly with TUI again after this”, exclaims Catherine.