Jim Clarke: Blog

When we arrived in Paris off the Dublin – Paris leg of our flight, we looked up to the tv screen and immediately discovered that our Paris – JHB flight for that evening was cancelled. We went over to the Air France transfer desk and they told us that the flight had been cancelled due to technical difficulties. We were originally due to fly out on the Wednesday evening arriving on Thursday morning to JHB and connecting to a 9am flight to Maputo, which would arrive around 10.30-11.00am. Once hearing all this, I handed over my e-ticket for the South African Airways flight, which was purchased completely separately from the Air France tickets and told them to make good on this ticket as we were travelling onwards from JHB. Nowadays, this is sometimes tricky when the carriers and tickets are not “in line” and purchased on the one ticket. However, they told me it would present no problem and started looking at the options for getting onwards to Maputo. Originally, they were saying we would overnight in Paris and then fly out the next morning but then they could not find a connecting flight to Maputo the next day at all if we did this. I explained to them that I needed to be in Maputo on Friday at 9am at the latest as I was speaking in a session that started at 9am and if I was going to miss this, there was no sense in going on the trip at all. I think that I might evenhave mentioned the word “refund” at this stage. With this, the ticket agent excused herself and went into a back room and spoke to a manager and then came back and told us that there were actually two seats left on the 11pm Air France flight that same night to JHB and we could have these seats. It turns out they were quite literally the last seats as they were in the very last row of the a/c (see my note about this under high-lights section as they were excellent seats). Once she rebooked us on this flight and printed our boarding cards, she seemed to turn her attention to the SAA flight, and eventually printed out something with the flight time of the SAA flight we were to go on, which was now at around 12 noon, instead of the original 9am flight we had been originally booked on. At this stage, we were fairly pleased with the outcome and were given the impression that the paper they gave me was all that was needed to get on this SAA flight. When we arrived the next morning in JHB, we walked quickly to the immigration/passport control desk to get into the baggage area as we were told by Air France personnel in Dublin that it would be safer to book the bag through to JHB only and collect the bags there and transfer them ourselves to the SAA flight. At the window with the immigration agent, we were surprised to learn that we needed a visa to enter into the baggage area. After explaining that we were getting an onward flight to Maputo, the agent pointed out that we needed to go back from whence we came and instead go to the transfer desk of SAA and ask them to speak to the Air France staff and they would collect and transfer our luggage directly to the SAA flight. So we didn’t actually officially enter Johannesberg on this trip. Oh well. After asking about our luggage and speaking to the Air France staff, they promised to collect our bags and transfer them (they did actually, which made us very happy later in Maputo to see our bags arrive). Back at the SAA desk, I presented the printout that the Air France lady had given me the night before and the SAA agent looked at it with a strange expression on her face and she then asked for my e-ticket instead. Being a little perplexed and a lot tired, I explained that this was all that I had from the Air France people during the rebooking process following the cancelled flight the previous night. She looked in the computer and told me that as far as they were concerned, our tickets were now cancelled as we had not turned up to the flight earlier that morning. Starting to get a little nervous and twitchy, I asked whether they had heard anything from Air France regarding us or anyone else on the cancelled Air France flight from the night before and they said, “Nope” or words to that affect. After explaining again what had happened in Paris the night before without sounding too concerned or worried, they very kindly said that they now understood the whole situation and they had a good working relationship with Air France and were sure that they would make good with the new tickets purchase for us. They re-issued new tickets, although I had to provide my credit card to them for some strange reason (their explanation was a little vague as to why they needed it). I will have to keep an eye on my credit card statements to see if there are any new charges to SAA! So I don’t know what happened with Air France, whether they had just simply forgotten to rebook our SAA tickets or whether it was done purposely. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was the former.

On the flight back, the only thing that was a little aggravating was there was a very short time between the flight arriving in Paris CDG and the flight back to Dublin. In addition, we arrived in 2C but the Dublinflight was in 2F, which required a quite long and infrequent coach ride. Most of the other passengers were also connecting to very tight flights and there was considerable stress in the small area where we were waiting for the coach to bring us to 2F. It was an extremely cold and breezy place that we had to wait and it was very frustrating because at least 10 buses for other terminals, mainly T1 arrived before the terminal 2 bus finally arrived. The staff that were present were not explaining to anyone why this was happening or when the next bus would arrive and there were some very anxious people waiting, a large number of them quite elderly. So we had to squish into the bus like sardines and we just made our connecting flight with minutes to spare. I asked the lady when boarding whether they would have held the flight for us and was told in no uncertain terms “NO!”. She said we would have been put on the next flight out, which was at least 6 hours later. Which would have been an extremely miserable to have to wait for that.