Gulp! Air....
Written: Jun 13 '00 (Updated Jun 14 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: ???
Cons: A lifetime is not enough to fully describe their tortures!
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| osmurad's Full Review: Gulf Air |
In my extensive travels around the world, I have only come across a few select airlines that truly deserve the "Flying Trash-can" award. Gulf Air is one of these fore-mentioned airlines.
While I have had negative experiences with many an airline, including being stranded by Emirates and Virgin because someone apparently drove an airport bus into the Airplane, Gulp Air has routinely left me stranded on and off the ground with an extremely rude, over-worked and apathetic staff.
I can vividly remember the summer of 1998. I was to fly Gulf Air from London, UK to Karachi, Pakistan. Well, surprises upon surprises! My flight was delayed. I had actually planned upon this due to a previous encounter with Gulf Air (why buy a ticket again you ask? I am cheap! And when one is cheap they can always convince themselves that the airline may have improved!). I came prepared with music, magazines, books and a portable game system.
BUT.... nothing had prepared me for an extra night at London, which, of course, Gulf Air forgot to mention. They later announced that they were putting us in a Hotel a very long time after the announcement that the passengers would be at the airport for the night so I went back home to my uncles. The next morning I came back to the Airport and took off amid a frenzy of activity and unhelpful ground staff, although there was this one lady who was nice, she actually smiled! Well, there were screaming kids everywhere, the air staff was unhelpful to say the least and the food I wouldn't feed to my worst enemy. As for cleanliness, the cabin wasn't that bad, but the restroom was a sight to behold!
While we are on the topic, I suppose I should add that Gulf Air does have some redeeming features (free booze!!!), such as toys for kids, and decent "gifts" if you are flying business or first class. The flying was decent and I thoroughly commend the pilot on not bowing in to peer-pressure at Gulf Air and screwing up his job. The in-flight movie was a joke, as there was only one and that too it was 5 years old and heavily edited.
On the way to Karachi, Gulf Air had a few more tortures for us up their sleeves. Firstly, a 2 hour stop in Bahrain where the transit passengers had to sit in the plane while a cleaning crew came abroad. Then it was onto Abu Dhabi. Once we landed at Abu Dhabi, UAE, which was supposed to be a 2 hour stop, it turned out that there was yet another malfunction with the plane (engineers at Gulf Air must make a killing). Therefore, by Gulf Airs approximation, the passengers would have to spend the night in yet another hotel, even though Karachi is roughly a 1.5 - 2 hour flight from Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Air made us wait for 5 hours before telling us, their weary passengers, their bread and butter, that in their “all engulfing” (no pun intended!) generosity, they have decided to put us up in a hotel (Whoop tee doo!) for the remainder of the night. Then, the Gulf Air crew did not bother to go around looking for passengers to tell them and thus my friend and I missed the bus. It's not as if we were causing havoc in a crazy duty-free shopping spree, we were sleeping in front of the ground staff in the departure lounge. After fighting (literally) with their ground staff they finally had a psycho driver drive us to the Hotel in a Volvo S40 at a constant speed of 140Km/H throughout the streets of Abu Dhabi, the driver must have been an ex-pilot at Gulf Air, he kept trying to make the car take-off, okay lame joke!
After the stressful, life/death experiences of the past few days, I got a well deserved 6 hours of sleep, and was flown back to Karachi in an Emirates flight (one of the best Airlines I have ever flown on). My parents were of course waiting for the Gulf Air flight, so they had to wait 2 hours at the airport for me as Gulf Air told me at the last moment that I was flying back on Emirates and they didn’t make any announcements. At least they didn't lose my baggage, probably due to the fact that they checked it out at Abu Dhabi airport, and we had to lug it back to the airport again the next day.
After this trip, my second painful experience with Gulf Air, I have decided that I will never fly Gulf Air again, I can’t do it kaptan!
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
osmurad
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Location: Amherst, MA
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 8 members
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