Huge, huge mess today and yesterday with Emirates at Dubai International
airport. Several cancelled flights, many delayed flights, passengers
with valid bookings denied boarding, miserable customer service and lots
of very ****ed off customers, who like us most likely will never fly
again with this airline.

It seems that Emirates has started overbooking on a massive scale some
time ago and as a consequence this terrible mess has happened.
Emirates claims that yesterday fog in Dubai forced some flights
cancellations, which triggered a chain reaction which led to this mess.
Another theory is that yesterday the Sheikh had the airport closed while
an airshow was taking place. Apparently 27000 passengers were affected.

Dramatic scenes at the transfer counters of Emirates, with huge queues
of travellers waiting for hours, only to be told that they could not
board the flights for which they had valid bookings. Extremely
inefficient customer service: at one point it took a counter almost one
hour to process a single customer. People told to queue up somewhere
else after they had waited 2-3 hours in the queue, prompting some very
angry reactions with people shouting at ground staff.

In most cases no compensation was offered to travellers for the huge
delays (some travel schedules were delayed by up to 24 hours), except
for some refreshments offered somewhere in Dubai airport. No (free)
accomodation in the airport hotel granted to tired and jet-lagged
passengers, despite these extremely long delays.

Huge profits for Emirates, because thanks to overbooking the flights are
completely full or close to completely full, despite the fact that
November is low season.

We instead had to pay an extra 632 Dirham (= 128 Euro) for a 6 hours
stay in the airport hotel (wife is pregnant and we have a three year old
child; both were tired after a night with very little sleep and would
have had to kill an additional 8 hours in Dubai airport, after waiting
for 4 hours at the transfer counter).

To top it all Emirates lost our luggage and that of 20 other passengers
of the EK51 flight. It didn't make it to Munich and hopefully we'll
receive it over the next few days.

If you think this is normal or things like these happen when travelling,
consider that since 1999 we travel at least once per year to Asia and
also in general are very frequent travellers. We have never experienced
a mess like this.

For all details see the travelogue which I will post in about a week.
--

Alfred Molon
http://www.molon.de - Photos of Asia, Africa and Europe