I would have gone for piss-poor service myself
The last time I flew - admittedly my own fault, perhaps, for choosing a budget flight - my flight from Perpignan to Southampton was delayed quite a bit. By about 5 hours, in fact.

So, sitting in this French airport lobby - with my grandmother, I hasten to add - someone eventually pipes up that Southampton airport will be closed by the time our plane takes off.

"Oh, they've sorted that out: they're going to fly you to Birmingham" said the airport official. (It was quite telling that only the airport staff were still there; the EasyJet staff had run for cover long ago...)

So, we were going to be flown from Birmingham, and bunged on a coach back to Southampton. Where, presumably, we'd have to get a taxi back from Soton to London (if the plane had taken off at the scheduled time, trains would have been plentiful). No Woo or Yay for you, EasyJet.

Fortunately, at Birmingham, we ended up queuing in Passport Control next to a family who'd booked a taxi to pick them up, but had only been able to book an 8-seater, and were conveniently going back to the same part of London. Woo yay!

Anyway, we get in this taxi and the cabby offers his sympathies about this delay, before relaying his own story: apparently earlier that year, his family had their flight back from Majorca delayed by 14 hours. The woman at the check-in desk said to him "well, we can get you on a flight that's leaving in an hour, though I don't think the other passengers will be very pleased."
"Why not?"
"Because their flight's already been delayed by 24 hours."

There we go. Not so much karma as...well, actually I don't know.

Oh, and it turns out the reason for our delay was that a seagull had collided with the landing gear as the plane came in, and the only EasyJet engineer available to check the plane over had to be flown in from Exeter. Now that's piss-poor service.

Sorry, I've just realised how long this is. Thank you for your patience.
(LongJohnBaldry, Tue 26 Feb 2008, 16:49, Reply)