Isn’t it ironic?
As always, this past December I was returning to Bilbao to celebrate Christmas with my family but this year traveling became more stressful than expected. Bearing in mind that my parent’s house is minutes away from the Bilbao airport, it makes sense for me to fly there but unfortunately there are no direct flights from Switzerland, so I always end up having to connect somewhere in between. Over the past few years, I’ve gone through Milan with Alitalia or and Paris with Air France but this year I decided to go through Madrid with Iberia. Wrong decision.
On the way to Bilbao, my flight to Madrid was delayed for almost 2 hours which meant that I had to leg it to make it to the connecting flight to Bilbao. Thank god that the Bilbao bound flight was also delayed, otherwise I would have ended up having to stay in Madrid overnight, and this is not a nice feeling when next day in Christmas Eve. When I finally landed in Bilbao, the luggage didn’t turn up. This is almost to be expected when there were barely 20 minutes between me landing in Madrid and me taking off towards Bilbao. Chances of getting my luggage, which was packed with Christmas presents, in time for Christmas Eve was slim and indeed, the luggage did not turn up until the 26th of December.
Throughout Christmas, there were plenty of stories about Iberia pilot strikes and one day, 7 out of 21 Madrid air traffic controllers were off sick (some called it yet another strike), so I was crossing my fingers for way back.
As soon as I arrived to Bilbao airport to start the journey back to Switzerland, they announced that the flight to Madrid was delayed 2 hours which meant that I was gonna mix my connection flight for sure. The Iberia airport staff, which I must say were extremely helpful, then changed my ticket and routed me with Spanair to Barcelona and from there, with Swiss to Geneva, and god, what a difference that made! These two flights were probably the two smoothest flights I’ve ever taken with the Swiss flight landing in Geneva 22 minutes before it was due!!!! Alanis, isn’t it ironic?
I do consider myself fairly luck though as things could have been much worse as seen in Madrid last week when heavy snow falls mixed with ongoing strikes, made travelling via Barajas, Madrid’s airport, absolute hell. Bear also in mind that days before I travelled back to Geneva, this airport was closed due to heavy snowfalls. However, what a PITA traveling can sometimes turn out to be!
Tagged as iberia + Categorized as Random