Dissappointed that EI seem to have dropped Krakow. Of all the Polish routes, this one had significant tourist numbers in addition to Poles traveling back and forth.
The problem is that Krakow Airport is in a location where it is very suspect to have poor visibility, which results more than average number of morning closures due to fog, there's been a few days where that has happened in the past fortnight. Aer Lingus' poor diversion practices for airports in Poland really are not passenger friendly.
In such circumstance EI almost always choose to divert to SXF, which is over 500km away and refuse to land at Katowice due to the fact that is not an EI served airport. Their official line for this is because they have their own handling agent at Berlin, so landing at a place where such handling agent is present is a 'better outcome' for passengers which simply is not the case. It also doesn't help when the crew make some very disparaging comments about regional airports in Poland not being able to accommodate an Airbus A320 despite the fact they regularly took A321's from other carriers.
Passengers then face a journey up to 12 hours by road, as was once the case with a friend of mine, just to reach Krakow. Alternatively they could have landed in Katowice just 81km away and just an hour by road and arranged a bus to pick the passengers up. Yes that would have involved a bit more work for someone in Dublin, but a much better outcome for passengers as it wouldn't have took 10 hours to arrange a bus, bearing in mind it's not that far from Krakow.
I also experienced something similar on a flight to WAW in November 2010. Flight to WAW diverted to SXF as WAW closed due to snow cabin crew told us that all airports in Poland were closed and had to divert to Berlin. Friend of mine waiting in Warsaw for me saw that the flag carriers were diverting to Lodz, Krakow, Katowice, Poznan. AL was the only carrier to divert outside Poland and the only airport closed was WAW. Cabin crew vanished from SXF very quickly after dropping us off and we arrived in Warsaw about 20 hours late.
This week we have seen that Warsaw Modlin has been closed for many flights because of fog, Ryanair have diverted every flight to WAW despite it is the only airport in Poland they don't serve, whilst W6 have also diverted all their flights to WAW despite the fact they no longer serve this. We've also saw all Krakow flights which have been effected from multiple airlines, which have pretty much all diverted to Katowice despite the fact that the vast majority of the airlines at Krakow apart from Ryanair, don't serve Katowice.
After the experience with the diversion to Berlin on more than one occasion, a few of my friends have declared they would never use Aer Lingus again. And they haven't. Neither have I for routes to Poland and would never do so again in the winter no matter how cheap the price. Sadly this is something that Aer Lingus have to deal with, and if HQ don't want the hassle of arranging transport from Katowice to Krakow because they don't have their own handling agent there to do it for them, then quite frankly they don't deserve customers.
I'm a frequent Aer Lingus user for short hop flights to the UK and also to France and Germany, but obviously I most often fly to Poland and wouldn't dream of using them again. Unfortunately their diversion policy seems to only consider EI served airports, FR fare much better in that they seem to always go for the closest open airport and then try and run the return flight from the airport they diverted to. Really I'd expect more considering EI do pride themselves on offering a better standard of service.