Hi Harry, part of the problem was that they were penned in a transit area with few if any facilities.....
Dave, thanks but at the time the situation needed more than a message to Emirates support; it needed the intervention of a senior person with some nous and clout to get things done.
That happened, it seems, and most, perhaps all of the group are expected to be on their way, in Sha' Allah, at 2.30 am tomorrow, ie early Friday morning. So a good recovery, in the end, and credit where credit is due.
But the fact remains that when the delayed flight eventually landed at Dubai it came as a complete surprise to the ground staff that there would be 65 people on board who would miss their Colombo flight.
This knowledge was available from about 60 minutes after the STD of the flight from Manchester, ie about 10 hours before the aircraft landed in Dubai.
Dear God, we did one hell of a lot better than this back in the 1970s, in another Gulf airline, using the relatively primitive computer-based systems we had at that time and, of course the Telex. We could and did usually have alternative arrangements in place for everyone whose connections were missed by a delayed incoming flight from Europe or the Far East, by the time the delayed flight landed.
Why can't airlines like Emirates get this right, 40 years later? Why can't they even try? What the hell is wrong with the Management, apart from stultifying complacency? They either know what's going wrong, and don't give a toss, or they don't know in the first place because they don't bother to look. Either way, I would have them on the fist flight out with zero pay-off, if I owned Emirates.