Back from Budapest…long flight

It’s been a long flight from Budapest to Taiwan. My itinerary WAS Budapest – Amsterdam – Hong Kong – Taiwan, but in the end, it is a totally different story…

It’s a story marked with the keyword “delay”.

Portnoy and I went to Budapest airport on time and found out MALEV (Hungarian Airlines) flight was late as always. On MALEV website, it writes:

Malév aircraft flying short- and medium-haul routes have the best on-time arrival performance, the first 2008 quarterly report of the Association of European Airlines (AEA) shows.

But I don’t know why my flights with MALEV are both late for at least 40 minutes. It must be something wrong, either I am unlucky, or this report is @#@##.

Anyway, I rushed to the other gate as soon as I arrived in Amsterdam, as Schiphol Airport is HUGE. I didn’t get on the plane. It’s not because I missed the flight. I just couldn’t get on the plane. Originally I thought it was a computer problem, since my name was spelled wrong in Budapest. After asking for a reason, however, the KLM flight attendant told me many airlines oversell tickets because some people never showed up. Sometimes, however, when everyone shows up, they will ask some customers “who are willing to” accept another flight and some compensations. (Hello? I didn’t say I am willing to. You only told me I couldn’t get on the plane!) She seemed to be so familiar with the whole apology and compensation process that it made me believe these kinds of things happen all the time.

That’s why my flight was changed from 3:30pm to 8:45pm, which was later delayed to 9:40pm, to tell the truth. I stayed in Amsterdam airport for more than 6.5 hours instead of 1.5 hours.

By the way, I didn’t transfer in Hong Kong, but in Bangkok on my way back to Taiwan. Of course, my flight to Bangkok was late again back to Taiwan (why am I not surprised?), and that’s why I arrived at 6:45pm, not 11:45am in Taipei.

I know some GVers are still travelling around the world, such as Luis Carlos, Hana, Preetam, etc. Hope you all have the best travel karma on your way back to home.