I recently posted about my cancelled Kathmandu to London flight and wanted to share what happened next.
The first replacement leg from Kathmandu to Bangkok on Thai Airways went fine. I had about a 3.5 hour layover before my next flight from Bangkok to Istanbul with Turkish Airlines.
While waiting at the gate, a Turkish Airlines staff member checked my ticket and told me I wouldn’t be able to board because the flight was overbooked. Apparently the segment Qatar Airways had issued for me was actually standby, which nobody had told me during the rerouting process.
They showed me that the boarding pass for that flight didn’t have a ticket number attached to it, unlike my Istanbul to London segment. That basically meant I was just hoping for an empty seat. To make things worse, they said their flights were fully booked for the next month.
They escorted me to the Qatar transfer desk where, after a long wait, an agent rebooked me again. This time the route was Bangkok to Munich at 3 a.m., then Munich to London with British Airways.
In total I ended up spending about 9 hours at Bangkok airport and was pretty drained from the whole situation.
But there was an unexpected twist. When I later asked for a new luggage tag at the gate since my bag had originally been tagged to London, the Qatar agent handed me my updated boarding pass and it turned out to be First Class.
I had originally booked a Business Lite ticket, so the upgrade was a complete surprise and definitely helped make the long day feel a lot better.
One takeaway from this experience is that if you get rerouted, make sure every segment actually has a ticket number and isn’t issued as standby.
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