Flight cancellation fun

Well, you expect things to go wrong at some point, but that didn’t take long: my next flight, from Melbourne to Singapore this afternoon, has been cancelled (or if you like, delayed 16 hours). The usual ‘mechanical difficulties’.

The plane I was booked on was going on to London, and the people going that far are screwed; there are apparently no seats available from here to London or Europe on any airline by any route today – at 100% capacity (apparently this is one of the worst times of year due to summer holidays).

The guys standing next to me are going to miss connecting flights and a wedding :/.

I’m one of the lucky ones; I’m only going to Singapore today and thanks to hoofing it to the instructed locations after they paged me I got one of the last 5 seats Qantas have been able to get, so I’m flying out on Emirates tonight. I won’t get in to Singapore until about 7-8am (instead of midnight) and I’m not so great at sleeping on the plane, so I am going to be tiiiired tomorrow – but could be much worse off so not complaining!

And the Qantas staff in .au seem quite helpful, they’re certainly handling a fairly large (I presume ~300 people affected?) Saturday crisis fairly effectively, which is more than we’ve come to expect from the NZ domestic Qantas ppl :).