Arik Air: Flight W3:272 to Lagos: By Nodesh (A guest blogger)

2:15pm: Arrival at the Muritala Muhammed Airport. Abuja. Joined long queue at the Arik Air counter

3:00pm: About to obtain our boarding pass and check-in our luggage. A lady was between us and the attendant. She gave the lady hers boarding pass for flight W3:272 to Lagos.

3.02pm: The untruthful attendant was economical with the truth. She told three (3) different lies.

She: You are late.
We: What? What do you mean by that? We’ve been here since 2:00pm for a 3:40pm flight and you said we are late.
She: The flight is fully booked.
We: What do you mean? We didn’t just buy these tickets. Our company bought it since Monday.
She: Another lie I cannot remember.  ‘Can I put you on the 6:00pm flight?’

It was later we learnt that our tickets were sold to other passengers at an extra cost. Anyways, our flight rescheduled for 6:00pm didn’t leave Abuja until 11:55pm. Not a single one of Airk Air personnel gave us of any reason/apology for the delay. By 10:30pm, passengers who requested for a refund were refunded. Those who loathed mid-night flights or were scared of arriving and moving around Lagos around wee hours of the morning requested for their flight to be rescheduled for the next day. Crazy enough, they were not placed on the first nor second flight – God knows whatever happened to them.

We boarded the flight around 11:55pm only to find out that there are lots of passengers (even a governor)  on that flight than eight (8) of us who had been raising dust at the Arik Air counter and held the manager who was about retiring for the day to ransom – ‘Oga u can’t go anywhere until we board.’