A family's KLM passenger offload experience
Hi there
My family had a passenger offloading problem with KLM back in April for which I am still awaiting a satisfactory explanation from their Customer Care department.
Just wondering whether anyone here could shed any light on this sort of thing – sadly I am not a high-flyer at a major company so unlike the Ladbrokes chap and BA I don’t have much leverage…
This is what happened.
Self, husband, 7 and 4-year-old sons travelling ABZ-AMS all on same booking, hand luggage only. All passengers had boarded plane and were seated. Plane was fairly full but not 100% .
Captain then announced that ground staff had made a mistake and had erroneously boarded all passengers when they should have offloaded 15 passengers (and some luggage and cargo) due to payload issues. Ground staff (non-KLM, but not sure who) then came on board with list of 15 named passengers (note no request made for volunteers first) and summarily required them to disembark. Flight and cabin crew pretty disgruntled at the situation but not as disgruntled as the named passengers!
Among the 15 surnames were two males from our family (we have a gender variant in the surname) so obviously at least one was a child. But why split a family of four like that? Captain was sympathetic and raised this with the ground staff member with The List, who promptly said that if it was a problem then all four of us should disembark. As that implied that no discretion could be shown, we decided to stick rigidly to the list and stay split (on the basis that we were only going for the weekend to see friends we hadn't seen in years and there was no sense all four of us having the weekend spoilt if two could avoid it). So husband and 4-year-old disembarked and I stayed on with 7-year-old stayed on and flew to AMS. By the way, the 4-year-old weighs 21 kg so presumably offloading him could have made no material difference to the payload.
That in itself was bad enough, but KLM compounded the situation by promising to route them via Paris on the last CDG-AMS connection but cocked up the transfer so that they ended up stuck at CDG. Rather than stay in a hotel and put up with more faffing about in the morning, in the end they shared a hire car with some equally fed-up Dutch businessmen from the same flight who were driving up, arriving at hotel at 0215.
KLM eventually (in response to my complaint) offered the appropriate statutory compensation + expenses but as yet have not responded to the questions I raised which were:
a) How could the offloading list split a family with young children?
b) Why did they not first ask for volunteers?
c) (And of course the knock-on consequences - why did they cock up the Paris transfer...)
Note – I totally understand that sometimes it is necessary to offload passengers; my complaint is that they did it in a summary manner and their list split the family.
I assume that what happened was that they thought that in the circumstances a named list was the quickest way to reduce the payload and get the plane going rather than wasting time going through any other procedure. And that once they realised a family had been divided they thought it would be more expedient to try to kick the rest of the family off rather than appear to favour us over any other passengers.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I’m intrigued as to what (if any) criteria would be used to draw up the list.