AeroWesty

Some of these situations are beginning to border on the unbelievable. Someone tossed out in another thread that 100K are in HKG waiting to return to Europe. That's around 250 747s worth of passengers. In just 6 days. Where are they all sleeping? At two per room, that would occupy 50,000 hotel rooms booked at the last minute. In Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Tourism Board said here that only a total of 514K visitors arrived from the UK in all of 2009. Then add 218K from France and 211K from Germany. That's just over 2,500 per day split over those 3 countries. Sure there are also a lot of connecting passengers on EU-HKG flights too, but a lot of seats in coming days will go vacant due to people not having been able to start trips as well, so return seats for those journeys will open.

Something tells me that this whole backlog situation will clear up sooner than later based on three things. One, this thread. Second, we had a team of folks at our office last week in PDX who've all been able to secure seats back to Europe by this morning, with a choice of flights. Third, at least earlier today, one could book award seats on AA from ORD and JFK to LHR for flights tonight. I'd bet by this time next week we won't be hearing about people still waiting another week for a flight home except in the rarest of circumstances.