Palma de Mallorca is 29C and sunny. I know this because the departure screen above gate 34 at Warsaw airport (18C, cloudy) has been saying as much for the past hour.
For an hour before that, the departure screen above gate 36 delivered the same meteorological message. At around the time the plane was due to leave, though, a rumour took hold that the original gate was now history.
Instead, we would venture into the bowels of the Polish capital’s airport and the unloved gate 34, to await a bus transfer to the aircraft – wherever it might be.
Usually I enjoy taking “domestic” flights within the EU and wider Schengen area. British passengers are spoilt. Inflight announcements are made in everyone’s second language, English, and this is also the mode for conversations between different nationalities. On arrival there is need to go through passport control, eliminating possibly an hour’s wait. And you are generally flying somewhere appealing.
Passenger behaviour on intra-European flights is also fascinating: not just the preponderance of passengers who stand up and start sorting out their bags as soon as the wheels touch the runway, but the selfie tendency. Many continental travellers like to document every step of the journey, fixing their hair as the breeze blows across the apron before snapping a selfie at the foot of the aircraft stairs, blissfully ignorant of the admonitions of the hi-viz wearing ground crew. And then there’s the applause on arrival, which I reckon loosely correlates with a nation’s inclination for religious observance.
Back to that Mallorcan weather forecast. The Tuesday afternoon flight from Warsaw has an appealing schedule. It is due to arrive in Palma at 6.45pm, with a fair bit of sunshine left in the day to greet the arrivals from Poland. The 230-plus passengers anticipated drinks and tapas accompanied by the sun melting into the Mediterranean.
But the way the afternoon unfolded meant even the ample evening opening hours of Spanish restaurants may have been exhausted by the time some passengers reached their resorts.
“We’re sorry, your flight has been delayed,” announced the email from Wizz Air. Flight 1327 would now depart 35 minutes late. “We know how valuable your time is and we are doing our best to avoid further delay.”
Sometimes an airline’s best just isn’t good enough. That 35-minute window was just closing when another apologetic email arrived – saying the flight was now 65 minutes behind schedule. It appeared that the original plane rostered to operate the flight had been dispatched to Katowice in southern Poland, while a replacement had been found. Unfortunately, it was in another country: Lithuania. While Wizz Air sorted its fleet out, the numerous families with fractious toddlers were not having the best of days.
Aviation is fearsomely complex. It is a miracle that millions of us can fly safely and affordably around Europe each day.
Since the dawn of commercial flying, planes have been delayed for a host of reasons. But this seems to be a simple case of poor expectation management. Apologising for being a mere 35 minutes behind schedule is commendable – except when the next “sorry” message almost doubles the delay, and the actual departure turns out to be three times as long: 105 minutes.
After the plane switch, catering the new aircraft took time. With the flight well adrift of its schedule, extra delay was added waiting for an air-traffic control slot. None of this is a surprise.
Under two hours sliced from the start of a fortnight’s holiday in Mallorca is neither here nor there. Everyone on the flight was calm and polite (yes, even including me). People clapped – and stood up – when the plane landed.
The sun was setting over the control tower when we were allowed off. I bade farewell to the kind couple who had insisted that I deserved a selfie (with the male partner) to prove I had indeed boarded the plane at Warsaw airport.
The flight was safe; cheap (£50 for a three-hour, 1,200-mile journey); and effective in delivering me to Spain’s most popular island.
Yet passengers want to believe that their airline knows what it is doing, and that it really does “know how valuable your time is”. Creeping delays like last night’s give the impression of not caring too much. Compare the belated apology from the Wizz Air captain with the immediate response of US carrier Frontier Airlines when a flight from Buffalo to Orlando arrived 45 minutes behind schedule: a $50 voucher emailed to every passenger within minutes of touchdown. That is tangible respect for lost time.
A spokesperson for Wizz Air said: “We are very sorry that our passengers experienced a delay on this flight, which was the result of unscheduled aircraft maintenance and air-traffic control restrictions.
“In this instance, we did whatever possible to minimise the delay and get travellers to their destination as quickly as possible. While some delays are not always possible to avoid as they are outside of the airline’s control, more than 80 per cent of our flights arrived on time this year so far – and in Europe, we have the highest flight completion rate in the industry.
“Feedback from customers is very important to us and passenger communication is a key pillar under our ‘Customer First Compass’, so it’s an area we’re constantly looking to develop and improve. As part of this, we will shortly be launching new developments in our app, which will help streamline communications for our customers and provide real-time updates on the status of their flight.”
I like flying on Wizz Air. It has excellent crew and aircraft, at least as good as its bigger rivals, easyJet and Ryanair. But in future when that delay email arrives, I will take the number of minutes the airline first thought of, and treble it.
