Alitalia is a troubled airline company for some time, but they still try to remain on the market and people still buy tickets and fly with them. It is exactly what we have done two weeks ago and I believe that wasn’t the best choice. The idea is the time travel from Bucharest to Nice was 16 hours, far from a realistic one. That’s a time flight for when you cross the ocean, but certainly not when you travel just some countries distance.
Making the long story short, facts are the following: ticket was from Bucharest to Rome and from Rome to Nice. Flight was from Bucharest to “almost” Rome when the pilot said something like “We are sorry, we don’t have enough fuel to wait in line for landing, so I will take you to Pisa and we’ll see if you come back by buss or the same plane”. What happened after we landed in Pisa I wouldn’t frame it to a normal and professional conduct. Flight attendants were not communicating at all, people have their belts loosened and in two minutes there was a higgledy- piggledy by the entrance of the plane. Time spent in the plane without any communication was almost two hours when again the pilot was the one telling his passengers that we’re waiting for approval of landing from the tower in Rome.
Almost three hours and when we landed at Fumicino airport a guy was waiting for the ones having a connecting flight in the next half an hour. He said not to worry because the plane is waiting for us and we’ll arrive on scheduled time to Nice. But after walking us through the airport while stopping and talking to some other people or chatting on the phone, the same guy said, “Guys, I have to tell you something, your plane just took off”. Well I think you can imagine how angry we were . The guy, named Francesco, was messing with us and he just left us in the middle of the airport. We tried talking to several Alitalia personnel and the answer was the same: “we cannot help you. It was not our fault”. We managed in the end to find some representative of Alitalia at ticketing who changed our tickets to some other destination, two ours by car to Monaco, where we wanted to go. Story of that day ended beautifully and it definitely deserves another article here and you’ll have it soon.
Without trying to judge somebody, we just wanted to let you know the facts. The only person acting in a good manner was the pilot, captain of that plane, but all the others, maybe angry because of their job and not being paid properly, were just not that into what they were doing. I think maybe Alitalia managers should think twice and decide if they still want to be on the market or not, and if they really want, then maybe they should start thinking about passengers and personnel. It is definitely not my place to tell them what to do, but I think it is my right, as a passenger to tell them what they did will stop me from buying another ticket from Alitalia.
I do respect and appreciate the work of a person, no matter what it is and I think that when you are out there making your job, you should give your best. People are worth being respected. I am talking here both about passengers and Alitalia personnel.
And that’s the way our Monaco trip started but like I said, the travel to destination ended beautifully and days spent in Monte Carlo and surroundings are worth being told about on www.mytravelstudio.com.
