Sounded like an awful experiance for your granddaughter ddron.

In my experiance EK is only an ok experiance for their "normal" customers. Anyone who's got their toes across the line from normal tends to recieve an underaverage to poor experiance whilst flying with them, unless you've got gold status.

I've flown with them as an UM quite a few times when I was younger and could remember how crappy their ground service was, but their FAs tend to give better service. I loved SR's UM handling, I remember there being a room specially designated for UMs in ZRH with video games and all.