A short flight between Nice and Luxembourg on Friday turned into a 24-hour ordeal for some unlucky Volotea passengers. The evening flight was only meant to take 90 minutes, but some snafus saw the flight unable to make it to Luxembourg before that airport closed, resulting in a late night diversion to Lyon and a long bus trip the following day.
Departure delay results in a long trip roundabout flight to Luxembourg
Volotea flight V72578 was meant to push back at Nice’s Côte d’Azur Airport (NCE) at 19:35 on Good Friday. But things got off to a rocky start when half an hour before the scheduled departure time, Volotea announced to passengers a 75-minute delay. Inconvenient, but not necessarily the end of the world.
When boarding finally commenced at 20:45, there were some issues because two flights were boarding at once. The flight finally rolled down the runway in Nice at 21:30 but after one hour in the air, one of the pilots came onto the PA system and said the flight was diverting to Lyon (LYS) because Luxembourg Airport (LUX) had closed. Luxembourg Airport has a nighttime curfew from 23:00. The problem for passengers was that Lyons is some 310 miles (500 kilometers) from Luxembourg.
Claims of poor communication and a very long bus ride the next day
Passengers report that having landed in Lyon, they then had to hang around the airport for another 90 minutes while Volotea arranged hotel rooms and transfers. Passengers finally made it into their rooms around 01:30 on Saturday but then some passengers where advised they needed to be up by 05:00 for their flight to Luxembourg.
However, no buses turned up to the hotel until 10:30 on Saturday morning, by which time many passengers were reportedly getting a little fractious. But these buses weren’t heading to the airport. Passengers never flew the final leg to Luxemburg. Instead, Volotea bussed them the remaining distance, finally making it to their destination later on Saturday.
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“The company apologizes for these inconveniences,” says Volotea in a statement. “Each time, the only concern of the Volotea teams was to offer the best possible solution to its passengers. The company therefore offered the hotel night, breakfast included, to all passengers and put buses available to reach Luxembourg the next morning.”
Friday night’s problems for those Volotea passengers started before the Volotea aircraft arrived in Nice. The plane came out of Luxembourg but was delayed around one hour there because the baggage of a passenger who wasn’t on that flight was inadvertently loaded and then needed to be retrieved and offloaded. That flight got into Nice late and started a cascade of events that resulted in Saturday’s long bus ride.
Volotea is a Spanish low-cost airline that flies to 80 cities across 14 European countries. Luxembourg is one of 10 destinations the airline serves from Nice.
Source: France 3
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