Premier Inn Abu Dhabi
Etihad Flight Routes to Europe
Munich here we come
Our plan was to fly from Brisbane to Sydney on Wednesday August 15th to visit our beautiful grand daughter Rory, then fly Etihad standby from Sydney to Abu Dhabi and on to Milan. But as usual with standby, there’s hiccups - that’s part of the deal. All flights to Milan were already full!! We needed another strategy.
We got to Sydney OK and had a lovely catch up with Kez, Rory and Colleen, Kez’s Mum. Then the flight to Abu Dhabi was perfect, getting business class without any drama. But on arrival in Abu Dhabi, it’s chaos. Every flight out of Abu Dhabi to Europe is not only full, but oversold and the Etihad Staff service check in is crammed with 300 staff trying to do the same as us - get out of Abu Dhabi. We decide to try for an early morning flight to Munich, as this looked the best of the worst options, and book into the Premier Inn Hotel for the rest of the night to have a quiet place while we plan our next move. It’s a nice place to stopover - but with the action starting again in a few hours, there’s no time to sleep.
At 1am I visit the staff check in area and wait in some sort of 10 deep queue for an hour and a half before being told every flight is oversold by 20 or more, plus there’s 10 or more staff on standby for each flight. A well kept secret was that this was the first day of a 9 day holiday in Abu Dhabi. We knew that July/August is holiday time in Europe, but usually by mid to late August most people are leaving Europe, not going there.
We sit and study the Etihad flight route map and Bonnie hastily books us on 5 flights to Europe. So when we return at 6am in the morning, we’re booked to go to not only Milan, but Munich, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. Our friendly guy behind the counter was very helpful as I had told him we’d go anywhere in Europe just to get out of Abu Dhabi and he suggested multiple bookings. While we’re waiting in the queue, he tells us there’s plenty of seats to Athens so we hurried'y book a 7th destination and immediately given economy boarding passes, whilst waiting for final closures on the other destinations which were closer to Milan where we eventually want to finish up.
At 8.35, after much tooing and froing, we finally get economy seats to Munich, and cancel all other destinations - the benefit of standby is no penalty. It’s a mad rush to get to Gate 17 and luckily the flight is delayed. Finally we’re off to Munich and will figure out how to get back to Milan later.