Virgin on Chaos and Jetstar System of a Down
Posted by Meggs | Fishing Holiday Stories | Posted on December 17th, 2009
Fishing & Reef Tour Specialists complete with Ugly Shirts at Sydney Airport
Greetings all!
Well this week Skipper Meggs had the opportunity to head south to (very!) sunny Melbourne but unfortunately not with rod and reel in tow. Isn’t it terrible when business gets in the way of a good fishing trip?
Anyway, for our past few (major) fishing holidays the Fishing & Reef Tour Specialist crew have packed their bags and rod tubes and made our way out to airports to be flown all around the country to exotic fishing locations in the far north. We’ve been on aircraft small and large and to date have had no issue or major hiccups.
So there I was on Monday around 6am at Sydney airport wondering why there was such a crowd in the place at this time of year. Thankfully I was flying with Virgin and the issue was with Jetstar – their reservation systems were down and as such they had to manually check passengers onto flights. Although there was a minor delay of half hour with my flight it was probably nothing in comparison to the poor people who (intended) to fly with Jetstar that day.
My wife and I went to Thailand earlier this year and although we could have got a direct flight in and out of Phuket on Jetstar our travel agent recommended a Thai Airways flight. They were concerned that there would be issues with the Jetstar flights and didn’t want to take any risks. We flew Thai.
I was also booked on a Virgin flight on the way back to Sydney from Melbourne. You wouldn’t read about it but on Tuesday the exact same issue (reservation system outage) happened to Virgin at Melbourne airport. I believe that this was a major problem and perhaps not as easily fixed as the Jetstar issue as some 50 flights had to be canceled on Tuesday as a result. The flow on effect for me on Wednesday was that my flight was delayed for an hour and a half which meant that I was forced to drink my Virgin Lounge membership almost dry before take off. I was lucky enough to be seated in an exit row and I took advantage of the additional leg room to have a well deserved snooze. Every Wednesday night I head down to have a drink at the local club with a few mates and I eventually arrived there at around 9:45pm.
Anyway, there’s very little you can do in these situations. All you can be thankful for is that they happen on business trips and not fishing ones. And as you can see from the video above things could have been much worse!
Sea you later,
Skipper Meggs