Sydney-bound but stuck in a ‘confusing’ flight bungle

FUMING passengers caught out by the Gold Coast Airport power outage on Monday say it was “chaos” in the terminal and airline communications were “confusing”.

Charlotte Poirier, flying Gold Coast to Sydney, said she arrived at Coolangatta’s airport at 7.30am to “absolute chaos” claiming hundreds in the departures terminal made it impossible to move.

“We had a flight booked with Virgin for 9.20am – you couldn’t walk inside,” Ms Poirier said.

Ms Poirier claimed Virgin had not informed passengers of cancellations or delays prior to their arrival and information received later on was contradicted by other Virgin employees.

“We checked-in our luggage but the moment we did that we were told our flight had been cancelled,” she said.

“We were then told we had to wait as our luggage was being taken to the plane. We were given a number so we called Virgin who said our flight was just delayed, so we rushed back to them (on the ground) saying it was cancelled. There was misinformation everywhere, it was so confusing.”

Ms Poirier said the airline had offered accommodation and details with a new flight but another staffer told them that wouldn’t be the case.

“We called the phone number again and were booked on another flight for 2.20pm. We haven’t been offered any water any food – it’s just not good enough.”

Passenger Jeremy Mawson was flying to Melbourne at 11.55am. His Virgin flight wasn’t cancelled but the airline kicked him off to give the seat to another passenger, he claimed: “I’ve been bumped to tomorrow. I only learnt when I got here and was trying to check-in. I don’t know why I was bumped.

“Virgin said there are flights from Brisbane this afternoon – but they said they were unable to help and gave me a phone number. They seem to be under a lot of stress.”