Rantings of a Caribbean Traveller
Sat, Aug 19, '06
Remind me to avoid catching a 6:00 am flight. I'm just not a morning person. I did try to get it changed, but despite the West Indies cricket team's media Officer Imran Khan's best efforts, that was not to be.
So the clock was set for 3:15 am, I heard the alarm (two Fridays ago I didn't!) and was at the airport by 5:00 am. Another day in the life of a frequent traveller throughout the Caribbean.
I'm sure more people travel a lot more often than I do and could rant about more things than I could. My rantings though are through the eyes firstly of a Customer Service trainer and secondly from my involvement in cricket journalism. What's taking place next year? Right. The World Cup. It is with that in mind that I rant.
For a 6:00 am flight, chances are the travellers and the airline agents have not had breakfast and are therefore more irritable than if they'd had fuelled their brains with food. Fortunately, on my flight from Antigua last Tuesday, everyone was well behaved and pleasant. The agents smiled with me and the guy collecting the departure tax cracked a joke with me. There ended the pleasantries.
I had seen a line just outside the departure lounge area and wondered what it was for. Can't recall ever encountering a line there. Got closer and discovered that with about four flights leaving early, and just two immigration officers, it was no wonder the line was moving at a snail's pace. To the lady checking tickets and passports at the door I asked "how come the line so long?" Hear her smart answer: "Because people travelling!" the end of the sentence going up in a crescendo indicating it was a dumb question. It probably was.
The question I should have asked, which she wouldn't have been able to answer, is why only two immigration officers were working? But based on the set up inside the Antigua airport, there really isn't space for much more. And besides, there is only one scanner through which everybody's shoes, laptops, bags and hats had to pass.
The last time I was in Antigua in July, I read that they are planning to have a tent to handle the influx of visitors expected for the Super Eight matches the new Sir Vivian Richards stadium will host. I hope it's a big tent. But I wonder how the current airport now deals with tourists coming on vacation? Antigua is known to be a very popular destination in the Eastern Caribbean. When the UK flights stop off in Antigua, most of the plane empties out and leaves a trickle of people for Grenada.
Does the inconvenience of waiting in long slow-moving lines deter tourists from coming to the Caribbean? Probably not. Will it deter people from coming to the Caribbean for the Cricket World Cup? I'm sure not. So why rant about it? To challenge the status quo. To let our people know that it is not okay, that our standards must rise to world class levels. We cannot be boasting that this is going to be the best World Cup ever, and have spectators experience angst and horrors at our ports of entry and exit.
Now, not all airports are bad. Despite Piarco in Trinidad's huge size, I give the Grantley Adams in Barbados first prize. That is for facilities, layout and ease of movement only. When it comes to friendliness, their immigration officers rank near the bottom. I recall sometime earlier this year when I was travelling from Grenada to Jamaica -- yes, on another 6:00 am flight -- I had to go through Barbados. Because LIAT and BWIA have divorced (more about that later), I have to now clear Immigration, collect my luggage, clear Customs, walk all the way over to the BWIA counter and go through the check-in process all over again.
Having taken advantage of BWIA's online booking system, where lower fares are available, I did not have a paper ticket. I also didn't print out the itinerary. Big mistake. Miss Thing promptly told me to "stand over there, I have other passengers in the line" when I suggested to her that she call BWIA to verify that I was in fact not staying in Barbados.
What other choices did she have? Well, she could have called one of her colleagues in the office and asked him to assist and urged me to next time walk with the itinerary and not just the locator number. I had to rant to one of the Immigration Officers in the office and then he told me to have a seat and somebody would help me, which was done. Sorted, but confirmed my impressions of the surly nature of most Immigration Officers in Barbados.
In Trinidad, they sometimes tend to question you more. Last summer, I was booked to leave from Trinidad to Jamaica and had gone over to Grenada for a couple of days. The flight from Trinidad is at 7:00 am, so I had to come from Grenada the day before. Listen to what the Immigration Officer asked me when she saw I was spending one night in her country: "So there is no flight to Jamaica today?" I managed not to let the blood boil and instead said very sweetly "so you don't want me to spend any extra time in your country" to which she tried to make it right but failed. I ranted about this on my personal blog as I do about many of my airline mishaps.
About the LIAT and BWIA divorce, I gather it was initiated by LIAT. They changed their system and it is now not compatible with BWIA. When you book one of their fares online and you get confirmation, they tell you that "LIAT is now a low cost carrier and as a consequence does not provide flight connections or baggage transfer to other carriers." I like to follow instructions, so when I was leaving Jamaica in May for St Kitts via St Maarten and the BWIA agent asked if he should tag the bags to St Kitts, I said definitely not! That would have been the last I would see of my luggage for that day. And I was right. Many of the Indian cricket journalists who travelled on that flight, did not get their bags until a day or two after, because their bags were tagged to St Kitts.
Actually, I nearly never got my bags either. After not seeing them come onto the carousel in St Maarten, I poked my head through the flaps (disobeying instructions!) and asked the guy outside to look for my two cases. He said that was all. No more St Maarten bags; the rest were for St Kitts. I shouted and told him no, my bags were there. We had this exchange for a few minutes and eventually they appeared.
You know things are bad when you give thanks for seeing your luggage slowly making its way towards you on the carousel. How many of you have lost your luggage on inter-Caribbean flights? One good friend of mine went to St Vincent from Jamaica, and she has not seen her suitcase since. This was over one year ago. How can a suitcase get lost? Was it stolen? Only the airlines know.
Another things which peeves me is the way that airlines often don't know. You call to ask what time a flight is landing. They tell you they don't know. You call to ask if the flight you're going on will be leaving on time, they tell you they don't know. This happened to me in Grenada recently. Was booked to go up to Antigua on LIAT to see Grenada whoop Guyana (ok, so they lost the plot a bit!). About 2 hours prior to the departure time, I called to find out if the 3:25pm flight would be on time. The lady only hesitating and telling me she can't give me any information. I harass her and she passes me to the Supervisor who doesn't shed any more light.
I arrive at the airport about one hour and 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. The agent tells me the flight is late. How late? 1.5 hours late. I have a connection in Barbados . Is the connection late? Yes. Only by 1 hour. Are there any later flights from Barbados to Antigua. No. So why di $&$^#@ oonu mek me come to the airport and waste my time?? I do not wish to be stranded in Barbados! So back home I went and watched the match on TV.
So that begs the question. What is going to happen to those Caribbean people who can't get all the time off in the world, who decide to leave tonight for a game tomorrow in a neighbouring island and the flight is cancelled and there is no space on the one tomorrow morning? Will the airline refund the cost of the match ticket? I don't think so.
Is just like with that divorce business. The rest of my family were booked to join me in St Vincent last Tuesday night. The BWIA and LIAT portions were booked separately, the latter to take advantage of the very low fares online. As Murphy's Law would have it, BWIA was three hours behind schedule and they were going to miss the LIAT connection in Barbados. From St Vincent, I asked the LIAT office if there was a later flight. Nope. They would have to overnight in Barbados. Does BWIA pick up that tab since they would have caused the family to miss the flight? Nope. Why? Because the LIAT portion was not booked through BWIA. Their obligation was only to get the family to Barbados and they fulfilled that.
You're just so tired of cussing.
Travel through the Caribbean has been the same since I took my first trip as an adult in 1990. The only thing that has changed is that there are more airlines and more routes to cause more chaos! My friends over at Cricket World Cup headquarters would probably not like to see an article like this but after Michael Hall's recent rant, I figured I had a licence to do likewise.
World Cup venue boss Don Lockerbie will tell you that he missed the inspection of Warner Park in St Kitts earlier in May, because they cancelled the flight from Antigua to St Kitts without notice. So everybody knows it exists. What are they doing about it? That's the million dollar question. We can't hear a peep out of those in the know. Next year we will turn up and find out.
Everybody is concerned about stadia not being ready. That is definitely not a worry for me. Grass has been laid on most of the outfields. Spectators can carry some cushions and sit on the concrete if they really want to see the matches (yes, I know, the ICC won't allow that). But my fear is that there will still be spectators wending their way through immigration checkpoints, if their flight manages to leave where they are coming from as scheduled, and then filling out Lost Luggage reports while World Cup games are in process.