What's the worst experience you ever had with an airline?

[dreamerrr]

For me, it has been Etihad Airways. What I'm going to share, I hope never happens to anyone. TLDR at the end.

My wife and I had the worst experience with this airline one can ever imagine. We bought an already overpriced ticket from Islamabad to Wellington and were to fly from ISB->AUH->SYD->WLG on 1st of April, 2018. Our trip was for 3 months and we were returning from Newzealand via Etihad as well at the end of June.

On the morning of 1st April, when we reached the airport, 3 hours ahead of time, we were told by the Etihad boarding crew that they can't let us board our flight as one of the segment on our flight has a layover of 12 hours in SYD. Which means we would require a transit visa for Australia. Instead of allowing us to reschedule that segment after Abu Dhabi, even after us offering to pay the difference, they didn't allow us to board our flight to Abu Dhabi. Okay, harsh but still understandable as visas are travelers responsibility. But what they did next was shocking. We went home dejected to see an email from Expedia (through whom I booked the ticket) that there has been a change in our flights.

Etihad Airways made the following change(s) to your itinerary:

• Cancelled 5 of your flights.

They outrageously canceled all our leading flights and return tickets (5 in all) that were due after 3 months!!!

First, out of disbelief, I thought it would be a mistake and we can get the return flights sorted out by contacting their support. How naive we were to be this optimistic. Next day, after trying out for a couple of hours to get some human on phone we lost hope. We turned to social media, as usual, that's where they listen when publicity is at stake. After a lot of support from others on our comments at Facebook, they finally called me on phone next day.

The person on the phone wasn't only rude but with broken English tried to make it our own fault and said that its Etihad policy to cancel all leading flights of a ticket for No Shows. Her thick head wasn't grasping the fact that we have proof that we have waited at the boarding desk for two hours as it can be seen from the airport log that our passports were scanned. So how can that be a no-show? Also, Is this even legal to cancel future flights like that?

Anyways long story short, they are not going to change the cancel flights, not even refund a single penny. Here is their reply

I urge everyone who is reading this to never ever fly via Etihad again. If you don't believe me. Open their facebook page and see the comments under any of their public posts. It is full of people with terrible experiences.

TLDR, We had 6 flights worth USD4,000 from PK to NZ, Etihad didn't let us fly because of a layover transit visa issue and canceled all next 5 flights, even the ones 3 months in future. No refund/No credit!

[Tayyaba]

@fais3000 ohhh, that's really bad. I also heard some bad experience of passengers flying from Eithad Airlines.