You get what you pay for
A very close relative has just gone through one of their worst travel experiences ever, in other words a total nightmare for a family with two toddlers stuck in airports for almost three days. The journey of arriving to Cancun, Mexico, was a smooth one, so no one was ready for what was waiting for them on the trip back with Flair Air! And that it will turn into a waiting game. Apparently because of a malfunction, the aircraft couldn’t take off and it seems the spare part was not immediately available.
I remember more than two decades ago, we took a flight from, Entebbe with Kenya airways, and after a delay of more than three hours we were told that there was a malfunction and that a team was dispatched to buy the spare part! I was shocked that they gave us such information in the first place, and during all this time, we were seated in the plane, we were then asked to leave the plane and wait in the airport.
Whenever something like this happens and I am just moving from point A to point B, the delay just upsets me, but when I have a connecting flight, then I become anxious and frustrated. Fortunately this time it was just a trip to Nairobi, but I could see passengers with destinations further than Nairobi getting more and more vexed and annoyed. The saga continued for some more hours, and finally the plane took off, in my heart I was praying that the spare part was genuine and not a fake found in Owino Market!
After this trip we were talking to a friend who happened to be an aviation engineer, he told us there were so many parts involved in the making of the aircraft, and that a malfunction of a small important piece, could bring about catastrophic results, well, that didn’t help matters, however its clearly established the number of road accident victims surpasses the number of aircraft crashes, so nothing to worry about.
Going back to our initial story, our relative said that the tickets he purchased from Flair air, were four hundred dollars cheaper than other airlines, so multiplied by four, it meant a big difference in price, but then he ended up paying a high price for the cheaper ticket, wasted time, tired and frustrated with two toddlers and loosing working days, and by the time they came home, they were sick with a bad flu and the daughter had high fever!
Gone are the days when travelling by planes were considered a luxury, and with the advent of budget airlines, budget hotels and so on, the situation will not get better any time soon, also because of the degrading economic situation in the whole world, it is now too often that we see strikes by air and ground staff for a better pay, and one of the most renowned airlines “Lufthansa” has not been spared, I wouldn’t risk travelling with them any time soon.
