tff

That's it. It's part of rule 2.7 of the Terms and Conditions: "In the event of a transfer onto an alternative flight due to unforeseen circumstances the Member will earn Level and Award Miles for the flight the Member originally purchased, not for the route flown".

ABZMike

Xandrios

The klm flight just arrived in ATH. There is a fresh crew waiting to board..however they say that we most probably won’t be allowed to depart towards Ams before 11pm NL time.

Say that we arrive at the time that Schiphol.nl estimates (around 2am), i’d like to stay airside for 2-3 hours and catch the first train of the morning. Unfortunately I have checked luggage. Would I still be able to pick that up 3 hrs after the flight has landed, or will that create problems?

Otherwise, any advises on where to stay landside for a few hours until 5am?

irishguy28

In normal circumstances it shouldn't be a problem picking up luggage after a 3 hour delay - though by then it will have been taken off the belt and taken away by the relevant ground handling staff, and it could take you forever to have them locate it and re-deliver it. Particularly with all the delays ongoing at the moment, I would not recommend abandoning your luggage, and would make sure you take possession of it immediately.

I'm not sure why you want to stay airside for 3 hours; the lounges won't be open [unless as a measure for stranded pax; but I really doubt this]

The landslide part of the airport may be a bit off-limits; I know from passing through Schiphol train station late at night that the airport is officially "closed" and there may be security there that ask to see your boarding pass; they don't seem to like to have people lingering, though this is probably more directed at vagrants rather than passengers.

There's a website called Sleeping in Airports, which should give you a better idea of what Schiphol is like at night. Sounds like you have time to google it and read up

Good luck!

Xandrios

Thanks. That's exactly what I was thinking as well with the luggage.

Reason for wanting to stay airside is because that is where seating is, and like you said, part of the landslide airport is closed during night. Not sure if they will let me wait there until 5am.

Sleeping in airports seems to focus mostly on the airside part unfortunately

nldogbert

Hi,
I got caught in this mess, as I had my AMS-CDG flight cancelled. Received the noticed yesterday, and tried to call the Plat line and even tried to get my travel office to rebook me. No luck. Did go all the way to Schiphol and it was a mess there...lines everywhere and poor staff all worked till they dropped.
However sadly, quite a bad performance on their side when they predicted this and did not put more staff on it. I did not manage to get anyone on the line and just decided to grab a train to CDG from AMS today. Arrived at CDG and my ticket was initially cancelled, but when they found out what I did, they reinstated this. Quite good on this side.

Do not understand why the same repeat scenario every year. They should have already a contingency plan in place....

Waiting now for my flight to SIN with AF. No problem at all on this side.

Cheers!

johan rebel

There may be a few people in e.g. Oslo who do know. You may have heard of the place.

Deicing at AMS is a joke. Is there any other major airport in the world that relies on one of its customer airlines to provide a deicing service run by volunteers?

Johan

SpinzCity

Still stuck at BHX with no support whatever from KLM (Twitter Facebook etc.). At the airport the bag drop people said no-one there could rebook. The app offers me connections to Hamburg from Amsterdam early tomorrow, through CDG - -but I'm at BHX, not AMS! The KL website on my laptop at least has an option on Wednesday I can select, but when I select it and pull the trigger I get 'technical failure.'

Goldorak

Yes, CDG is operating normally. The weather is bad here with strong winds, cold temperature and some rain, but no snow.

CyBeR

So far as I know de-icing is done both by KLM and by Schiphol, and the people who run the ice removals from the runways and whatnot are mostly if not completely employed by Schiphol. At least this is what the Schiphol people have always told me.

It's also not entirely reasonable to expect Schiphol to have a huge team of people sitting around doing nothing 360 days out of the year to deal with 5 days of inclement weather, so maybe what they're doing is not entirely a terrible solution.

fkl

Just spent more than 60 minutes on KLM hotline and finally gave up... KLM is not doing exactly a great job I think now

ABZMike

Andrew_G

I was on the KL flight to Chengdu on Monday that had an engine failure just after take-off and returned to AMS after dumping fuel (it was quite exciting, if a little scary at first). By the time I reached baggage claim at about 1.30am I had already been rebooked on China Southern. Unfortunately that route wasn't eligible for Chinese TWOV. But the platinum line picked up in seconds and I asked them to rebook me on Qatar, which they did in about a minute. Then I wandered across to the Citizen M hotel and was surprised they had a room, so I stayed there. A mixture of bad luck and good luck for me so far, but the platinum line was impressive.

COFF-Platinum

Hmm, based on the announcements from the cockpit, I don't believe this to be the case. Comparing with other flights to India around the same time, jet airways managed to get both their flights out with minimal delays. KLM did not. They did manage to regain 30 minutes inflight and I guess it's quite possible that KLM works against an ontime arrival taking these 30 minutes known in the flight plan into account rather than an ontime departure. In this case an ontime departure would have worked much better for the passengers as the window of opportunity was clearly limited.
I'm not going to waste my time on a complaint, just venting my frustration a bit, Thanks for listening ;-)

Xandrios

Im finally on a train back home. Was (thankfully I might add) able to crash at a friends place in Amsterdam as every single hotel was sold out when we arrived at 1am. Most people on the flight had to sleep at the airport.

Still a long taxi line around that time, but I was the only one on bus N95. Just my luck that it was the bus drivers first day and he literally drove in circles as he wasn’t familiar with the route nor area. Finally arrived at 2:30 AM or so.

I have the same complaint as the poster above. The A3 flight (Ams-Ath) was delayed by 57 minutes. The klm flight, with an almost identical departure time, was delayed 3h 20m. With so many flights canceled it could not have been shortage of equipment for sure?