How to handle long airport layovers

Long airport delays are nothing new they happen all to often.

How we love to fly away to far exotic places, we have to fly to them we have no choice its the cheapest way to get there, But we will at times have long layover.

When you fly there will be times when you will have to wait for your flight. I don’t mean the usual times that you wait, but the times when you have more than three hours waiting. This can happen when Flying to Australia from the UK, there will be quite a long stopover either in Singapore or Dubai. The usual stopover in Singapore will be a day, the stop over in Dubai will be just half a day, and thats not to bad await.

What I tend to do when I go to Australia is to go by Singapore and book a hotel for a day, I leave my luggage at the airport at the left luggage department and I collect it the next day. I also make Singapore part of my journey, that is to say I look around the nice city for at least half a day.

Sometimes though it will not be your fault that you have to wait,sometimes it is totally out of your hands, this will because the airlines are just like any other business, things happen out of there control. This happened to me a few years ago when the French air controllers went on strike over there pay, this meant that anyone flying over French airspace would have long delays, in fact those long delays meant that myself and my family along with about 300,00 other family’s had over 24 hour delays at the airport going out and coming back.

If this happens to you there is not much that you can do about it. But there ways to make things that little bit more comfortable, this is what I and a lot of other people did. We went and saw our Representative, the person who was in charge of our flight. We asked for free food at set intervals, and after a few choice words we got what we wanted. We told them in no uncertain terms that it was not our fault that we were stuck in the airport and why should we spend one penny of our money paying for expensive food and drink.

Now being stuck at an airport is not a nice experience for any one, lets face it they are dull and bleak places with little or nothing to do. And the temptation is to go to the nearest bar and sink a few jars of the jolly old nectar. this is the worst thing that you can do, now I am not saying don’t have a drink of the amber stuff but don’t have to many, because in this day and age the airlines are only to willing to throw you of the plane at the least chance that they get. This means that if you get on the plane that little bit under the weather with drink, they will take of ask you if you would like a drink, you of course will say yes, you will then have one or two more and because you have had quite few on the ground, you might become that little bit more drunk. Thats when they will land at the nearest available airport and the boys in blue will be waiting for you.

These things do happen so be very careful when waiting for your flight on a airport lay over.