Message #1643729

[Ali the Baseball Cat]

First prize is a free night in Doha...second price is two free nights

While people continue to make vacation plans (I have a visit to Lisbon plus my annual London trip coming up over the next couple of months) - thanks to Skytrax, the #1 air travel forum site (www.airlinequality.com), a bit of wisdom from one of the forum posters...you know how everything would be absolute perfection on your trip if it were run only to YOUR specifications:

'We had a dreadful experience with Qatar Airways travelling QR2 on 13th Sept 2015. We were delayed 2 hours because a passenger onboard wasn't feeling well as the plane was taxiing out. Instead of offloading this passenger, the captain decided to wait for a doctor to treat them. The passenger was found to be fit to travel and we departed 2 hours late. This meant we missed our connecting flight at Doha for the onward leg to the Maldives. What made us angry was that our connecting flight was still on the ground at Doha when we landed, but couldn't be held for a short time to allow connecting passengers to board. On arrival we were presented with transfer and hotel vouchers as we disembarked at Doha at 7.30am. We were not allowed to retrieve luggage and were taken by minibus to a hotel on the outskirts of Doha (the Golden Ocean), which seemed like a 2 star hotel. We tried to sleep but this proved impossible as the hotel is situated next to a building site - there was constant drilling and hammering all day long. Not having access to any of our luggage compounded the misery, as we couldn't change into clean clothes. We were collected at 10pm for the flight to the Maldives which departed at 1am. No member of staff apologised at any time - we felt abandoned. We missed 2 nights sleep in a row and arrived at our holiday destination shattered. We spent the holiday fretting about the return journey, as the connection time was a mere 55 minutes, and we dreaded missing it. The final insult was being told our flight from Doha back to London was departing late because it was waiting for some passengers coming in on a delayed flight.'

[emphasis added]