The "no fair" airline

Hey y'all. No song lyrics in the header tonight, no sirree. Yours truly wishes to express annoyance with this post, and I wanted to make that clear right from scratch. I'm hacked-off. Okay, not quite that bad, but I do feel a fair amount of indignation, and whom better to share it with than you, my loyal readership? Okay, so here's the story.

(obviously, this is from www.mal-nach-Marokko.de, as are the other pics)

At the risk of repeating myself, I have been closely following the exploits of my good friends Johannes and Gundula, who set out earlier this year on a bicycle tour from Germany to Morocco. (here's the link to their travel website) In fact, I've had the privilege of having been able to assist my friends with some minor logistical issues during their travels. I knew they must be pretty near their destination, so was all the more surprised when Joe skype-called me late last Saturday night (we'd been up watching a movie with C's sister, who was visiting) to ask for help. Their dilemma was the following; they had booked return flights to Germany from Marrakech with a certain low-fare carrier of Irish origin, planning well ahead and taking advantage of online booking facilities. Now, while they were already on the road, an e-mail arrived informing them that the airline in question was not going to fly them home after all "due to an outstanding Open Skies agreement" that meant their flight was cancelled. So far, so dandy. They were offered a refund or the option of rebooking to another destination. This was what Joe was asking me to do; to liaise with his Dad on getting all the relevant information, then basically make sure a rebooked flight would get them back to Germany in time for several important appointments. Now, the airline in question only flies to one German airport and, with all flights on that route cancelled until further notice, I was going to need to get them to another European destination like, say, Barcelone or London, then get a connecting flight to Germany. I assumed that, since the cancellation e-mail expressly stated rebooking was possible, it would be the easiest thing in the world. I was wrong, of course. So, after gathering all the information necessary (it transpired that a flight to one London airport, then a connecting flight from another, would be the only feasible option), I rang the booking/information hotline. After having listened to an easy two minutes' worth of call-centre drivel (and getting kicked out of the queue), the Irish voice at the other end made it clear in no uncertain terms that there was, in fact, no way this airline was going to get my friends home from the Sahara. Yes, they would re-book the flight from Marrakech to London, but wouldn't do the connecting flight, let alone the bus fare for the airport transfer. My protests that hey, they had screwed up and therefore it was (kind of) their responsibility to get my friends out of the Sahara desert, that both my friends and I had been loyal and frequent users of the airline, etc., fell upon dead ears. Nope, there was ab-so-lunkly no way they were going to budge from doing the absolute minimum they could. And no, they didn't care whether or not we would ever use the carrier again afterwards ("that's for you to know, sir"). How nice is that??? I don't remember ever being told to eff off before, but that's, I think, as close as I'd care to get to it. Grrr! I was very tempted, I'll tell you now, to try and incite some sort of revolution - to ask all of you to spam the helpline with a scripted phone call pressuring them to help my friends or something. To start an "I'll never fly with you lot again - here's my vote" website or something. Shame I'm such a craven polite backer-down, really. Anyway, at least I've told all of you how I feel - it's a start, eh?