We visited Lake Como as the last part of a trip to Italy that had included a cruise around the Adriatic and some time in Milan and Venice. We were staying in Gravedona and needed to get back to Milan Malpensa Airport for our flight back to the UK. The plan was to get a bus from Gravedona to Colico, a train from Colico to Milano Centrale, then connect to another train to the airport. The day before we were leaving we heard that there was going to be a transport strike in Italy, but it was unclear what services would be affected.
On departure day we waited at the bus stops and the time for two of the scheduled buses came and went, we did however see a bus going in the other direction indicating that buses were running in some capacity. After an extended period of panic a bus finally showed up and we were able to get to the train station only to find it locked.
We discovered that there were going to be no trains running from Colico to Milan until after noon, which would have put us at risk of missing our flight. After puttering around for a while we were approached by another traveller needing to get to the airport and asked if we wanted to share a taxi. After some consideration I decided to take him up on the offer and along with one other person the four of us split the 100 Euro bill to the airport.
We arrived at the airport on time for our flight, feeling that the worst was over and we had managed to get past this rather uncomfortable situation. Sadly this wasn’t the case. It turned out that there were serious weather conditions leaving the United Kingdom causing the incoming flight to be cancelled. As a result, we were bumped from our 7pm departure to one at minutes to 11pm.
By this time we had already been at Milan airport for three and a half hours and were facing a further six hour wait. We were really not impressed.
This flight did leave on time but once we had landed in the UK we had missed the last coach home and were told by the rather unhelpful British Airways staff that we would need to spend the night in the airport since all the hotels around Heathrow were fully booked. This lead to me spending one of my more memorable nights, watching Shleah sleep on one of the offered blankets whilst I patrolled around Heathrow Terminal 5.
In the end thanks to EU regulation 261/2004 we were able to claim compensation for our delay which more than covered the cost of our initial flights, can’t say that was of any comfort during that night in the airport.
From this experience we learnt to always find out about any planned strike action ahead of time. Furthermore if possible spend your last night of a complicated itinerary as close to the airport as possible. We can look back on this now and laugh but at the time it was definitely not funny. At the very least it has given us an interesting story to tell and hopefully it can save someone else from some of the stress we went through
