Family holiday to Australia - 2 adults, 2 children. We flew Business class with Emirates to Dubai aboard an A380 on 25/7/12 and this was a very good experience. The journey that followed from Dubai to Brisbane involved a fuelstop in Singapore and the aircraft was the less comfortable Boeing 777.

During the flight our older son Max, who is 15 years old, suffered motionsickness - something he is prone to do. He was sick a couple of times but seemed to be over the worst by the time we landed in Singapore (he had stopped bringing anything up about an hour before we landed) though was still suffering from that feeling of nausea. Not pleasant for him but therewas no disturbance to other passengers - all the action had been in the toilet!

On re-embarking the 'plane we were greeted by stewards asking how we were and my wife pointed out that we were all excited about getting to Australia as it had been a long trip from London and that Max was not feeling 100% as he had been suffering motion sickness on the previous leg of the journey.

Ten minutes or so later there was an announcement that there would be a fifteen minute delay to the flight as some bags needed to be taken out of the hold. Some while after that a steward approached my wife to say that we needed to leave the aircraft. Apparently, without us knowing anything about it, Max's condition had been reported by a steward to Medlink, an airline health advice bureau, as 'constantly throwing up' and consequently Medlink had judged that he was too ill to fly. The bags that had been removed turned
out to be ours!

Crucially, this description given of Max's condition was totally factually inaccurate - he had not actually been properly sick for some time.

My wife, who works as Head Teacher of a primary school and therefore has routine experience of children, school trips, and a great deal of experience of this type of situation, had been monitoring Max's condition since he had started to feel unwell. She was more than happy that Max was only suffering motion sickness and so was I. In contrast, the Emirates assessment of Max's condition had been made in an instant as we boarded the 'plane without anyone actually having any contact at all with Max (no one even spoke with
him) and there seemed to be no Emirates steward on the aircraft qualified to make any diagnosis of his symptoms in the usual way.

After protesting vociferously the Purser eventually seemed to accept that there was no evidence at all that Max needed to be removed from the aircraft and he agreed to speak with the Captain to see if we might continue with our journey. It looked as if common sense would prevail.

We were standing in a position where we could see this conversation take place and can confirm that the Captain reacted noisily and with a lot of hand waving - he seemed upset to say the least. After a couple of minutes the Purser came rushing back to say that we must leave the aircraft straight away and there was nothing more he could do. We were really disgusted that at no point did the Captain get up to come and speak with us himself.

Left with little choice but to leave as our bags had already been removed and security would be called if we didn't, we were led from the aircraft like criminals, both our children crying. But we simply didn't know what else we could do? We were taken directly to the Raffles Medical centre (within Singapore airport) by the ground crew where Max was seen by a Doctor and declared 'fit to fly' within minutes of us leaving the 'plane.

We were then told that whereas Emirates had said that they would put us on the next flight to Brisbane it turned out that they would only put us on the next Emirates flight which was the same time a full day later. They completely refused to pay for a Qantas flight leaving some hours later and also the cost of seeing the doctor for the 'fit to fly' piece of paper and the transit hotel costs in Singapore would need to be borne by us directly.

So we paid to fly with Qantas to Brisbane a few hours later as we couldn't face getting back onto an Emirates flight. American Express Travel were great in supporting us throughout - such a difference in attitude between these two organisations.

We have had numerous exchanges since with SH who handles Complaints for Emirates ([email protected]) and have still to receive even an apology from her or Emirates for the way that we were treated. She even wrote to us after 'personally reviewing' the file and referred to our son throughout her letter by the wrong name which was a complete disgrace.

We therefore would like to share with other travellers that Emirates appear to know absolutely nothing at all about how to handle families with a child prone to motion sickness and travelling long distances. They know even less about customer service. Never again