An airplane from Low-cost carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle should have departed from Bangkok on 9.30 am on Sunday 8 September. But the flight was cancelled, which meant that 300 passengers going to Stockholm stranded in Bangkok. After a while the message from Norwegian was that the delay would be two days.
Among the stranded passengers, Danish paper BT found the Dane Kenneth Sørensen, who lives in Sweden working for Arla Foods. He had been on vacation with his Thai wife, and on Sunday their vacation was extended against their will.
“I am going to miss two days from work and my wife should have been back for study,” Kenneth Sørensen said to BT.
He felt that it was almost impossible to get in contact with Norwegian.
“We did not get a lot of information. Norwegian has no staff in Thailand, so the airport staff took care of finding us a hotel,” he said.
Asked how bad two extra days of holiday is when it is raining in Denmark, he answered:
“That is not the worst that could happen of course, and I already have been to the pool today. But I have to go home for work, and I would like to decide myself for how long I am going to stay away. My wife also stayed away from school for long enough time,” he said.
Norwegian admits that the long delay is way too long.
“It happened due to a technical fault on the airplane, and we are so sorry,” Norwegian’s Communications Manager Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen said to BT.
He further explains that Norwegian wanted to sent the passengers home in their own airplane, while accommodate them on hotels with food served, instead of re-booking them to other airlines.
Confronted with the passengers experiences with missing information, Sandaker-Nielsen said to BT:
“We are doing the best we can to inform our passengers. Among other things, we are sending them text-messages with updates on the delays.”
According to BT passenger Kenneth Sørensen did not receive a message from Norwegian on his phone.
