Hamburg, 24.05.2025: Missed Flights and Würst with Potato Salad

We arrived in Hamburg on the 24th totally worn out after a nightmare in the Atlanta airport. Our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam on the 23rd took off five hours late, causing us to miss our connecting flight to Hamburg. I wrote about this debacle on Facebook:

We got to Atlanta in good time to meet our flight to Amsterdam, from which we connect to Hamburg. When we got onto the plane in Little Rock, we had gotten messages telling us that our flight out of Atlanta would be delayed by five hours. I’m suspicious of how Delta manages situations like this and think they waited to send that announcement to us after we had boarded in Little Rock.

So we got to Atlanta, went to the Delta counter where lots of people were sitting at computers doing nothing, and found there was a gatekeeper. You could not get to the people in the holy sanctuary of computers without going through her first.

There was a long line of people waiting to talk to the gatekeeper. We got to her, explained that our flight was delayed five hours and we would miss our connecting flight to Hamburg. We said we wanted to approach the people in the sanctuary of computers to ask when we would finally get to Hamburg so we could notify our friends there.

We were then graciously allowed to approach the holy sanctuary. There, we learned what we fully expected to hear, which is that no one can tell us when we will arrive in Hamburg.

“Go to that wall over there and talk on one of those red phones,” we were graciously told. As we walked away, Steve muttered, “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I will pick up that red phone.”

And:

Now as we continue waiting in Atlanta airport for the flight to Amsterdam that was scheduled to leave at 5:20 but is now scheduled for 9:15 (a four-hour delay and not five hours as I said earlier) we’re being told that our flight overseas will involve a “downgrade of equipment” and all seat assignments have changed.

Then:

I'm typing this from the waiting room in Amsterdam airport where we're waiting for our flight to Hamburg, the connection we missed due to Delta delaying our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam by over five hours. We were scheduled to leave Atlanta at 5:20 or 5:30 P.M. yesterday. We finally flew out of Atlanta at 10:40. 

I had known we were in for an experience when I heard an announcement in Little Rock airport yesterday that a Delta flight for Charlotte scheduled to leave that day would not leave until the next day, due to "mechanical problems" with the plane and the lack of a flight crew. 

When Delta finally got a plane for us out of Atlanta, they announced that the flight had been oversold by forty people and the "equipment" had been downgraded, so that all seats would have to be reassigned.

Only after we had boarded did they announce that there had been "problems" with the plane originally assigned to take us overseas, and they had to wait over five hours for one to land from South Korea. 

We could be much more patient with all of this — though in our experience, it's getting a lot worse when we fly Delta repeatedly — if they'd only be honest and up-front with passengers from the outset about what's going on. The problem repeatedly is that there are just no flight crews to fly flights that have been long scheduled and booked.

So we got onto the plane in Atlanta ready to head to Amsterdam, and Delta immediately sent a text: We apologize for the inconvenience. We know many of you are missing connecting flights. There will be a team of Delta agents waiting at your gate in Amsterdam to find you a new connecting flight.

We land, we unboard, and there is NO TEAM OF DELTA AGENTS waiting to find a connecting flight for all of us. There are only two Delta employees of the level that push wheelchairs around who herd us along to the concourse and say that "down there" — they point "down there" — we'd find agents who could help us.

We walk and walk. There are no agents "down there." We can find no one at all to assist us, no Delta agents anywhere. 

After walking a half hour, we come to a passport check. We wait in a long, long line for the passport check, and the young government official who checks our passports tells us there's a "T desk" that handles setting up flights for those who have missed them.

He helpfully writes the T number down for us and explains how to find that desk. Only after we had gotten to that desk — with help from the government official — do we get another connecting flight.

And that's what we're waiting on now. 

Steve managed to sleep some on the plane as we flew over the Atlantic, thankfully. I just don't sleep at all well on planes. So I'm pretty groggy and this posting may make no sense. We seem to have been up … forever … and still haven't reached our final destination.

But thank goodness, it's now in sight!

W. met us at the airport. He had come by taxi since there was a May workers’ demonstration blocking his and K.’s street, so we came by taxi from the airport to their apartment, and after having sat a bit and eaten some potato salad K. made with Würst W. boiled, and bread, we retired for the night and Steve and I slept many hours.