After a year, I won!

A little bit more than a year ago I started a fight against Iberia. What for?
Well, thanks to them I lost a flight and I had to spent the night in Madrid. What accounted for the lost of one day of paid work.

I remember very well that day. 15th July 2018. As every year, I spent two weeks in the beginning of July back home, in Pamplona, during the Sanfermine's Festival that takes places always from the 6th July to the 14th. The festival (las fiestas) of my city.

Sadly it ended the 14th and obviously the 15th I had to take a flight back to London to come back to work the 16th. Normally I fly from Bilbao or Biarritz, however, on that occasion, Iberia offered a direct flight from Pamplona with a stopover in Madrid. It sounded so awesome that I took it! Nevertheless it turned out a nightmare.

Pamplona's Airport is tiny and at the time scheduled for my flight there was just one plane on the track. We passed the security control quite fast and early. But the waiting become all of the sudden longer and longer and most of the passengers started wondering whether we were going to loose our connections in Madrid. We checked with the cabin crew, who constantly stated that everything was on time. "No problem at all, there is no delayed... ", they repeated, (really?) Frankly those words were unconvincing and you could feel the nervousness growing on the passengers, overall because we were hearing that the plane needed petrol and nobody was advising us about the real status of our flight.

A while later we finally got to the plane. Once we were inside we checked again with the cabin crew if we were going to make it since almost everyone had short connections flights in Madrid. They assured us once again that we weren't going to have any problems at all and that we would be advised to which terminal did we have to go to. But the worst thing was that we had to spend quite a lot of time in situ waiting for someone to put petrol in the aircraft. Taking this into consideration I asked again the cabin crew about the confusing situation, who said there was no need to worry about because my second flight was going to take off from the same terminal as this flight was meant to land.

Obviously you can deduce that I lost my connection in Madrid. We took off quite late and we landed in Madrid beyond the scheduled time. Besides, my second flight departed from an extension of the terminal where I landed, thus it was kind of like a completely different terminal, just reachable by train. I didn't manage to take my flight and the second one going to London was full. Consequently Iberia drove me to a hotel in the capital ,offered me accommodation and a shuttle to return the following day to the airport so I could take another flight.

I was utterly upset. The cabin crew should have been honest with us and should have had better information regarding the terminals, and to crap it all, I was going to loose one day of paid work. Totally unfair.

That is the reason why I claimed to Iberia straightaway the compensation that, by law, I was entitled to. However, their only reply (many months later) was something around these lines: "I am so sorry, I will improve my services but I am not going to give you any type of compensation". Amazing, bravo. What a service. Therefore I decided to escalate the claim to the Spanish Association of Airlines, AESA, which, after several months, sent to me a report confirming that I was entitled to that compensation. It was such my delight that I sent it quickly to Iberia threatening them with a claim court if they didn't give me the money (by the way it is very complicated to contact Iberia, which is unacceptable). On that occasion, and surprisingly, I finally got the money. I won against an awful and dreadful customer service :)

It seemed impossible but it wasn't. I did it. One year later, but I did it. It is a real shame though that such a simple thing has taken one year...It is very clear that it is just a game to avoid wasting so much money solving their mistakes.