Having an Eti-BAD day

I've had quite a lot of trouble with Etihad over the last few days. First, I tried and failed to purchase some exit row seats - the computer system refused my cards (and L's Singaporean cards too, so the problem seemed to  be with their system). I also couldn't check in online. Eventually, I contacted them by twitter and they promised to phone me, but they didn't manage that until Monday morning. I agreed to pay for the exit row seats over the phone, but in the end the man I was talking to said everything would be fine, the changes had been made in the system, and we should pay at the airport.

OK, fine. But when we got to the airport nothing seemed to be recognised and nothing seemed to be possible. In the end, we managed to get the change made (and paid for), at least for the Singapore - Abu Dhabi leg, at the gate rather than at check in.

So that leg was fine, and left us arriving in good time at Abu Dhabi, where we had a wait of something over two hours. To say I was underwhelmed by the Abu Dhabi experience would be an understatement. First, we waited 10-15 minutes to access our parking position, and then we were bused into the terminal (squashed in the bus like sardines). Security was relatively cursory and a bit chaotic, but the real chaos started after that. It became rapidly apparent that the airport does not have anywhere near enough gate infrastructure to deal with the number of intercontinental flights that it hosts in and out every night. In the part of the terminal I photographed, security staff would cordon off part of the space, chuck out the people sitting there (and there was by no means enough sits for everyone to sit down anyway), and then make them queue in a different place to go through a document check before returning to the penned area where they would await the bus to their flight (unable to escape again to get something to drink or to go to the toilet). The treatment was worse than you get for an average cheap flight in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, and absurd for intercontinental flights involving very large numbers of very tired people, many of whom had flown, for example, from India or Australia. And many of whom have also paid a lot of money for their tickets. I'm not sure that business class passengers, once they had left behind the peace of the business class lounge, were being treated any better. Once on the bus, we waited in boiling conditions for about 10 minutes, before making our way back out to a distant parking stand, where we had the pleasure of climbing the steps to the aircraft whilst breathing aircraft fuel fumes.

To say that I was pissed off by the time I got inside the aircraft is a bit of an understatement, and I let the cabin crew know about my annoyance - although I made it plain I didn't blame them, but a mixture of the airline and the airport (both state owned) which had allowed this inadequate situation to develop. Funnily enough, though, they were very attentive for the rest of the flight.

And even more funnily, it turned out we did have exit row seats for this leg of the journey, and I don't think we even paid for them.

Apart from that, the journey went smoothly and we arrived even a little early into Edinburgh. There was a lot of baggage on the flight, and unfortunately our cases were amongst the last to emerge, but emerge they did, so there have been no mishaps on that score at all.

Back home, we've done some washing, and general sorting out. We wandered out at some point to get some vegetables for dinner. I'm not sure what time that was as my sense of time is all cockeyed. I won't make the mistake of breaking the 12-14 hour journey back from Singapore in that way in the future, or at least not during the night. I found it profoundly disorientating, and very tiring to end up back here before 9am when you felt like you'd already been awake for 24 hours. I think if you are going to travel overnight, it would make more sense to have one 12 hour leg to Heathrow, Manchester or Schiphol, followed by a shorter one back to Edinburgh. That way you'll get more sleep.

How much longer we'll be up is a moot question, but hopefully I'll feel brighter in the morning.