Coscan

Airline Horror Stories: The Ultimate Alitalia Week-Long Nightmare

Short on conversation at a cocktail party? Bring up holiday nightmares and you’ll have an hours-long conversation, with each visitor able to chime in with a different, equally frightening, holiday story. Annoyances, on-the-road setbacks, and patently enraging holiday hiccups have affected us all at one point, often to the point where an otherwise great holiday is remembered as a disaster from the get-go.

Delayed flights, lengthy airport layovers, and lost luggage are some of the most common travel complaints – frequent occurrences made worse by the fact that they’re almost always linked with missed appointments or lost possessions. While most airlines make up for their shortfalls, at least in travel vouchers or replaced, relocated, or reimbursed luggage, there’s always that one story that makes things seem as far from just as possible.

For foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten, that ultimate travel disaster was a delayed flight on Italian national carrier Alitalia. The planned two-hour layover left passengers stranded in Rome for over a week, with accommodation unpaid and possessions locked in airline security areas. Michael sums up his experiences in the first paragraph of the lengthy airline horror story:

“After spending several weeks each in Iraq and Lebanon at the end of 2008, I bought a plane ticket to the U.S. from Beirut on December 22 and figured I had plenty of time to get home for Christmas. I had no idea, though, that I had purchased my ticket from the worst airline company in the world – Italy’s national carrier Alitalia – and that a two-hour layover in Rome would turn into an ordeal that lasted longer than a week.”

If you’ve ever felt truly enraged by airline, travel agent, or airport service, the lengthy report is worth a read. Don’t say we didn’t warn you though – let this experience serve as a warning not to book flights on Alitalia.