My long-distance romance is stuck in a budget airline nightmare
Snapping up a cheap deal to Europe on the low-cost airline Scoot to finally meet the woman I fell in love with after a chance encounter on a Facebook group last year seemed too good to be true (as did the love affair, to be honest).
The love story blossomed like the wildflowers that grew around her apartment block in Finnish Lapland and the weeks went by like a dream, until it all ended in a nightmare at Vienna Airport in Austria. We'd paid through the nose to get seats together on the same flight back to Melbourne (she suffers anxiety when travelling alone), only to be met by incompetence and negligence at the check-in counter.
A passport number wrongly entered led to her being denied boarding and being stranded in Vienna with no support offered. Scoot has yet to respond to our pleas for them to honour their obligations under EU regulations. We're now stuck in limbo, unable to buy another flight while waiting for resolution and our joyful reunion. Some low-cost airlines are a price too high to pay.
Sam Quinlan, Preston, Vic
Letter of the week: High times
Ten years ago, we, too, thoroughly enjoyed touring in Switzerland, with one accidental bonus (Traveller, July 5). We arrived at Zermatt station just before a train was due to leave on the Gornergrat Railway. We rapidly decided that this was for us, so we bought tickets and got on. This was a serendipitous choice. The year 2015 was the 150th anniversary of the first ascent of the Matterhorn (which on a clear day can be seen from the railway) and, by chance, we encountered a group commemorating the efforts of the original mountaineers who had set out on July 14, 1865.
Ours was a group of locals including the band of the mountain guides, all in period costume and travelling to Gornergrat for a short concert, lunch and photo shoot. The Matterhorn is 4478 metres above sea level with Gornergrat at 3089 metres, just across a glaciated valley, so the view is magnificent. So, not only did we have this view, but also, quite inadvertently, we had our lunch with the local Swiss mountain guides.
Simon Allen, Cooma, NSW
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