If you can afford to be late, then by all means, take this airline. But if you want to be somewhere on time, don’t ever ever ever book with this airline. Let me tell you my nightmare.
I booked thru Kayak, which supposedly used Vayama (yeah, what company?) to book the trip. A 9am departure out of Newark, arriving at 11:55am in Freeport, Bahamas – direct flight. A few days before the trip, I get an alert notifying me that the departure time is now 6am – and my departure out of the Bahamas 5 days later is now 4 hours later. Fine, no big deal, a little early, but whatever.
The day we leave, we arrived at Newark and waited about 20 minutes to check-in – for 10 people. Why so long? Because Bahamasair does not have kiosks, or even computers to check people in. They are literally looking at the name on my passport and then looking through a stapled booklet of paper to find my name on the manifest.
Which, of course, my fiancee and I are not on. “What do you mean we’re not on the manifest? Here is our confirmation number.” Employee: “Nope, sorry.” Employee calls HQ and apparently we’re still not in the database. But he throws us on there anyway. So that was lucky I guess?
We breeze through security – it’s 5am mind you – and then wait in the terminal. 6am hits, we’re not boarding. Of course, how could we if everyone is still checking in! 7:30 hits – “Sorry folks, we still need to fuel the plane.” Hmm, wouldn’t that be a good thing to do 2 hours ago?! 7:45 hits they board infants and children. Then 10 minutes later, “It’s gonna be another 30 minutes before we can board everyone else.” Um what? So a bunch of infants and their parents are just going to sit there? 10 minutes pass and they finally board the rest of us. We take off at what time? 9am. Maybe Kayak knew about this hassle which is why they said 9am in the first place.
Coming back from Freeport, we called the airline in the morning to make sure we were on the flight. (Originally supposed to be 4pm, but changed to 7:40 just like our outgoing flight.) Luckily we were on the manifest. We get to the airport about 2.5 hours before our departure time. We check-in (with computers!) and there is no security line. But – they put me 1A, and my fiancee in 1F, apart from each other! If we’re checking in together, don’t you think we’d want to sit together?!
So 7:00pm hits, 40 mins before our departure time. I can see the plane and the crew just about ready to go. 7:40 comes and goes, no boarding, no announcement. I ask why we haven’t boarded yet. Employee: “Oh the computers are down, so we have to manually check everyone in for your flight.”
We finally board around 9pm. The only benefit: my fiancee and I were essentially in first class with oversize seats, a ton of legroom and the first off the plane. We are now sitting at the gate but the main door is still open. And it remains open for the next 30-40 minutes. Why? Because they have more paperwork to do. Really? You couldn’t have done that paperwork while we waited for the past 3 hours?!?!
Finally we takeoff just before 10. Arrived in Newark around 12:30am – 2 hours late.
I will say this – the flight itself was great and the flight attendants were super friendly and understanding. A direct flight is nice from Freeport, but I would have much rather had a short layover in Miami or Ft. Lauderdale than experience the epic delays.
