DEN-EWR-LIS earlier this week. TLDR - GS isn’t what it used to be!

Arrived EWR mostly on-time. 2 hours to kill

We went to the PL and couldn’t find a place to sit as it was so crowded. Ate some snacks on the benches in the lobby and left to go find a place to eat.

Gate changed three times over the next two hours which was strange because the equipment it was showing arrived about 5 hours before we were to board.

Boarding time finally comes and goes, FAs standing around chatting, no announcement, etc. it’s EWR so I wasn’t overly concerned.

5 min before scheduled departure time, they pull the jet bridge and the plane drives off. GA says they needed the plane for a flight to JNB but no worries we have an identical replacement being brought over. That takes 30 min but she announces that the fully catered plane was the one that drove off and this new one isn’t catered, so we need to wait for catering. Add another hour for that and then our pilots come out to the gate area and announce they’ve been pulled off by Ops to fly the plane to JNB but there’s a plane on final and that crew can fly us to LIS.

FF another 90 min, the new crew isn’t there yet and our ORIGINAL crew shows back up and announces that they’ve been assigned BACK to our flight. Anyway, 4 hours late leaving, food sucked and the FAs seemed perpetually annoyed with even the smallest request. I asked the same FA for a mattress pad twice and never received it.

During the four hour delay, I neither spoke to or saw a GS agent.