Cover photo: La Provincia
Traveling to Lanzarote and ending up in Slovakia. This is what happened this Wednesday to José Antonio, a Galician man in his sixties who was scheduled to fly to Lanzarote from Barajas. That's what he thought he was doing when he boarded at 6 in the morning, was assigned his seat and fell asleep.
When he woke up, he opened the window and was "freaked out", as he himself explains. "The first thing I ask myself is where is the sea. But well, it could be that the plane landed in another way. And when I see that big green... Everyone got off and I said, hey guys, I'm going to Lanzarote", he says he told the crew. To his surprise, that was not Guacimeta, but Bratislava.
That was only the first part of his journey from the peninsula to the Canary Islands, with a particular stopover. José Antonio arrived at his destination close to midnight. The company, Ryanair, took him back to Madrid and, there, he spent the whole afternoon waiting for seats on the 9:30 p.m. flight to finally arrive in Lanzarote. Although he takes what happened as "a nice thing", José Antonio is also annoyed with the airline: "They treated me very badly, they didn't even give me a coffee or a glass of water".
"You can't get on a plane for free"
José Antonio relates that the company's employees didn't "stop" asking him how he changed rows. "There would be some black magic thing to get to the other side... are we all crazy?", he says between irony and anger.
According to him, the boarding gates for the Bratislava flight and the Lanzarote flight were together. "They changed me rows twice, once they put me in the Bratislava row, because now I know which one is the Bratislava one, then in the Lanzarote one and in the end I don't know, because they say that I went through the Lanzarote belt. I don't know how I did it".
This passenger had arrived in Madrid driving from Galicia the previous afternoon and had stayed out for drinks with friends, so he had barely slept. "I was dead tired, I'm almost 60 years old, it was 6 in the morning, without glasses...", he excuses himself. However, the question is not how he managed to board another plane, but how "they didn't realize", he points out in reference to the company.
"There are two things I remember very well: when I gave the ticket (to the flight attendant) she didn't even look at my ID or anything. There was a long line and, boom, we passed. And when I got to the plane I did notice that the guy did look. But he looked and said, well, there, in row 4", he explains. "How can I get on another plane? It's incredible, imagine if I was a terrorist! You can't get on a plane for free, like I did", he is indignant. Upon his arrival, again, in Barajas, José Antonio explains that the Police came all the way there. The agents themselves, he indicates, say "that it's their fault, that I don't have to know where I'm going, that they have to direct me". Despite everything, while waiting in Madrid to take, this time yes, the flight to Lanzarote, José Antonio took the situation with humor: "I hope to arrive well, let's see if this time I'm going to end up in Cairo".
