Air travel can be so complex sometimes... Even when it seems simple

Please pay attention. This is a complex story. You need to focus.

Now, I readily admit that it doesn’t seem that complex at first glance. You might even be fooled into thinking it’s trivially simple. I know I was, but like you, I had to learn that I was sadly mistaken.

Over the last three days, I travelled from London to Vienna, then Vienna to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to London. I know that doesn’t seem that complicated, but it really, really is.

I mean, what you’re supposed to do when you catch a plane is fly from point A to point B, do whatever you came to do, then travel from point B to point A. Even if there are intermediate stops in between, the basic principle holds. Out, then back.

A triangular trip? Way beyond the capacity of the airlines in our post-low cost age.

The first thing that went wrong is that I couldn’t check in on-line. So I turned up at the airport with nothing proving I was booked on the flight other than an e-mail from a booking system.

The second thing that went wrong was that the check-in machines inside the terminal wouldn’t check me in. A disdainful employee, aged about sixteen as far as I could see, came over to provide assistance. He clearly thought I looked about eighty.

“Let me see, sir, can I help at all?” he said, and you can just imagine the superior tone, can’t you? Underneath them is lurking the thought “poor old man, he doesn’t understand that you have to feed in your passport open, not closed.”

So he took my passport and fed it in, exactly as I had. “Your reference number, sir?” So I gave it to him and he typed it in, just as I had a few minutes earlier.

And then, just as I had, he stared, bemused, at the error message on the screen.

“You’d better go to a manned check-in desk, sir,” he advised, which at least had the merit of being exactly what I had intended to do.

The Austrian Airlines lady sorted me out, and off I went to Vienna.

Which is where the third thing went wrong. No suitcase greeted me on the carousel.

I went to see another Austrian Airlines lady.

“But,” she told me, “you are travelling to Frankfurt.”

“This is true,” I confirmed, “but not till tomorrow.”

“But your bag is in transfer, ready for the next leg of your trip.”

“Great. But what am I supposed to do during the day tomorrow? I have a meeting. My suit’s in the case.”

She considered this.

“Ah,” she said at last, “you are making a stay in Vienna.”

It was a relief that I had found someone with the necessary intellectual acuity to grasp the extent of my predicament.

She looked sorrowful, which didn’t calm my apprehension at all.

“We can get the bag brought round, but it could be a long time.”

It was getting on for 11:30 at night. I could picture myself stuck there till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. But in the end it only took twenty minutes, and she came round to check everything was OK, so we exchanged smiles and I thanked her warmly.

The fourth thing that went wrong was the next day, when I came to check my bag in again for Frankfurt.

“But you have a bag in the system already,” the third Austrian Airlines lady told me.

I looked, I hope pointedly, at my bag which was undeniably right there, stolid and unmistakeable.

“Do you have another bag?”

I explained to her that I didn’t. She called a colleague over. He explained to her that she had to delete the existing record for a bag in the system and then register a new one. She tried, and failed when the system told her she couldn’t delete the entry. So he had a go, slightly condescendingly, intent on proving that with his expertise, he wouldn’t make the same mistake she had. Until he bumped up against the same error message. At which point he hightailed it out of there, ostensibly to take care of the next passenger. 

I was delighted to see that the “next passenger” turned out to be a group of nineteen Mandarin speakers on a Kung Fu world tour. Served him right, I felt.

Meanwhile, my young lady called a support person, who was on break. Eventually, she got back from break and assured us she’d be right over, which turned out to be ten minutes later.

“So you want this bag checked through to London?” she asked.

I stayed calm.

“No,” I explained in measured tones, “Frankfurt, please. Where I can collect it.”

I made a point of checking the luggage tag carefully, to ensure it really was marked ‘FRA’. It was.

The fifth thing that went wrong was at Frankfurt today. I was pointed at a machine to get the luggage tag for my case.

Looks straightforward. But, believe me, it isn’t

“Your suitcase is already checked in,” the machine told me.

But this was Lufthansa, and they take no nonsense from machinery.

The woman who dealt with my case – and I use the word in both senses – was a battleaxe with pink hair.

“Problem?” she said, “there is no problem.”

The bag got checked in and sent on its way. As was I. And at Heathrow there was my suitcase on the belt, waiting for me.

Now I just have to get it home and bring this terribly complex trip to what I hope will be a happy conclusion.

Business travel: the glamour rediscovered

I’d forgotten how glamorous international business travel was, not having done any for a few years.

Fortunately, as I sit at a departure gate in Vienna airport with the prospect of another five hours travel to get home in the small hours, I can console myself for the renewed glamour by remembering the pleasure I’ve had from spending time with a bunch of colleagues: Germans, Austrians, a New Zealander and even an Italian who looked after me brilliantly: he it was who met me at the airport and insisted at the dining table in our hotel last night that there was no point not taking the whole bottle of wine and only having a glass each – we’d certainly finish it. As, indeed, we did.

But that was about the peak of glamour. Otherwise I took a taxi from the airport to an airless meeting room avoiding, in a city full of splendour, any sight worthy of note apart from the Danube (which you really can’t miss and, in my experience, is never blue at Vienna).

From the stifling meeting we got a taxi to the hotel, which we had failed to choose strategically: it took us nearly an hour to do get to it, 20 kilometres away. At one point, we even passed a sign telling us we were entering Vienna. I had no trouble believing we’d left the city, since we’d spent an unconscionable time struggling through traffic jams on motorways to get to that point, and we could have been just about anywhere.

That bottle of wine in the hotel wasn’t an indulgence, but a relief.

This morning we have another forty-minute taxi ride, this time for seven kilometres through the morning rush hour. That took us to another airless room where we spent the next six hours, bar a break for a canteen lunch, in another meeting.

As it happens, the meeting went well. I’d been sent out there because I’d had the misfortune of winning an unenviable, and undeserved, reputation for being a fluent German speaker. It’s one thing to be able to trade a couple of sentences and sound plausible with a colleague met in a corridor; it’s another to stand up in front of a meeting and sound as though you were competent. As my wife likes to ask me, “how can you have spent so long learning German, and even living out there, to still speak it so badly?”

Still, I got through the ordeal, by dint of judicious calls on my Austrian and German colleagues to field any question I felt too hard to handle. That was pretty well any question more complicated than “did you have a good trip in?” I’d learned the word for traffic jam, “Stau”, so I was fine with that.

Fielding the questions in that way had a double benefit: I could dodge the bullet, and even look like a real team player.

We still hadn’t seen any sights, apart from the Danube, which was visible from the conference room window. Though still not blue, it looked increasingly attractive as the meeting rolled on and the atmosphere became stuffier.

The Danube from the terrace of the bar
Majestic and fine – but who ever decided it was blue?

In the end, a small group of us did go for a drink down by the side of the river to celebrate a day that had avoided disasters. That was fun. And, as well as the pleasure of some congenial colleagues, I did also manage to have an Apfelstrüdel yesterday and a Wienerschnitzel at the airport just now, so, hey, I do at least have the sense of having been in Austria.

But glamorous? Decidedly not.