It is unfortunately one of the facts of life that if you book onto an airline who do a flight or two a week to take you into the sort of off-the-beaten-track destinations that people like to go on holiday to PRECISELY to get away from the industrialised world, then you do not have the luxury of a range of engineers licenced on type, a hangar full of spares, Boeing Product Support just down the road, and competent subcharter operators of widebodies you can turn to, that you get in London. If you want/need that reliability, go on holiday to Miami.
So even the airline may not know how they're going to handle it until someone gets there who can open it up, hopefully taking the right guess of likely spares with them, while you are improvising the fleet allocation. Actually I think getting a standby aircraft across two continents to pick them up in 24 hours was good going. Yes, communications can often be better.
By the way, I can't understand how a flight departing Goa on Wednesday, presumably arriving back in the UK Thursday, and delayed 24 hours, can impact on children returning to school I guess the following Monday.