Smoke in the cockpit! (Gulf Air)

Member Name: buchaben

Product:	Gulf Air
Date:	13/10/07 (777 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Service not first class all the time, planes not brilliant

Disadvantages: Good service

My experience travel with Gulf Air on a recent holiday to Thailand was a bit mixed. The one reason that I booked with them was because they were offering the lowest fares. I dealt with them quite a lot on a professional basis, and had found them to be OK so I decided to give them a try.

If you book a long-haul flight with Gulf Air you are likely to connect in one of their two hubs – Bahrain or Muscat. These are not bad airports, all with the good facilties that you would expect from an international standard airport.

The outbound flight was not that bad. The connection was good, the planes were not that crowded, the staff were polite and the food was OK. It was with the inbound flight that the problems came.

The flight to Bahrain was fine, but when departed Bahrain for Heathrow we were in the air for about 20mins and the plane started feeling very hot with several people commenting on this. A noticeably nervous sounding captain said plane turning back for ‘technical reasons’.

Upon landing he told us that there was smoke in the cockpit and we were to get off the plane ASAP. When we got back to the airport nobody knew what was going on. We waited around for about 4 hours wondering whether we were going anywhere. The staff were rude and uncourtious, and doing nothing to calm down the situation.

Eventually we were told the plane was going nowhere today and we were being put up in a hotel for the night. The hotel was lovely 4-5 star with a nice breakfast. I arrived home in the UK nearly 24hours after I was meant to.

I ended missing a book airport taxi and a day at work, I decided to write to Gulf to reclaim this financial cost, and express my concern about the way the passengers were first treated when we arrived back at Bahrain airpiort. Eventually after about 3 months of pestering them I got a reply, they gave me some frequent flyer miles. Hardly adequate considering I won’t be flying with them again!!

At times the service was good and I understand that if a plane has smoke in the cockpit it has to turn back, I just think that Gulf could have handled it differently. I’m not going to tell people to fly with them as I’m sure this does not happen on every flight, but I won’t use them again

Summary: Not quite Emirates, but not quite Air India