Business Class

Yesterday my girlfriend and I had one of those situations where you find that making a small amount of effort in the short term pays off massively in the long term. We set off for Heathrow Airport at a ridiculously early time in the morning for our 7:50am flight to Rotterdam. Shortly before it was supposed to take off they announced that our plane had been grounded due to a technical fault and KLM were going to have to send out a team of engineers from Amsterdam to fix it. As you can imagine, this didn't mean it was going to be a quick job. The guy who told us the flight was grounded said we should go to the KLM service desk where they'd try and re-book us onto another flight possibly to Amsterdam, but he said it didn't look good because all the flights to Amsterdam were already fully booked. I didn't need to be told twice, this was one of those clear situations were a very small amount of effort was going to pay off immensely. I wasn't wrong.

We rushed recklessly through terminal 4 to the KLM service desk, opposite gate 19 where a KLM flight to Amsterdam was boarding. There were a few business class passengers already being seen but we were at the front of the queue for normal passengers off our canceled flight. WOO! They started to trickle in behind us as we stood slightly flustered but happy at the front of the queue. The flustered attendants tried their best to find business class passengers and gold and platinum card holders to board onto the flight to Amsterdam. There were only 4 seats going. They couldn't find any business class passengers and eventually the attendant who looked fed up of being harassed by the back of the queue turned to us, standing patiently at the front of the queue, and booked us on the Amsterdam flight that was boarding behind us. WOO!

I didn't realise until we actually got on the plane that we were now going to be sitting in business class. I sat down, had a nice glass of water (in a glass, of course) and assured the stewardess that a Financial Times would be fine as they'd run out of Herald Tribunes. Our breakfast snack was a very nice selection of cheese on a fig compote with a freshly baked bread roll and fruit and rice pudding for desert. As it was still before 10am at this point I did not abuse the free booze. That said, as nice as Business Class is, and as much as I enjoyed it, it's certainly not worth the money on a 40 minute flight.

Once we landed in Amsterdam we got a train to Rotterdam (one happened to be waiting exactly as we got to the platform) and we arrived in Rotterdam a mere one and a half hours late. I am very sorry to the people behind us in the queue who didn't get on the flight we got on, and who apparently had also had their flight to London from Rotterdam on Friday canceled, but not that sorry.