She bought the plane ticket on January 25 with Spanair. She had to travel alone to Bilbao this Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. Her father was having surgery on Wednesday at the University Clinic of Pamplona. "I won't make it to his surgery because of Spanair. I had to buy another ticket to Bilbao with Air Europa for Wednesday with my own money. I won't arrive in Pamplona until Wednesday evening," said Sandra María Rivas, one of the many people affected by the airline's closure, to La Voz this Tuesday.
Spanair suddenly and without prior notice ceased its activity last Friday. Until that day, it was still selling tickets on its website. Nothing foreshadowed what happened on Friday afternoon, when the company decided not to fly anymore and suspended all operations. Not even the workers, who are in a kind of "limbo", in which they don't know what to do, nor what will become of them. And, on top of that, they had to attend to the passengers, who were "in solidarity" with the employees' dramatic situation.
Sandra found out about Spanair's closure on television. "The first thing I heard was that flights were being suspended and I thought it was because of the storm affecting the peninsula. Then I found out about the company's bankruptcy and saw that it was going to be a big problem," she says. Automatically, Sandra tried to contact the company. She called the phone number that Spanair set up for those affected, 902131415. "At first, they wouldn't even answer the phone, there was no way, not even with Aena. On Saturday morning I called the company again and waited about 15 minutes for them to connect me with someone," Sandra recounts.
Desperate, she went to the Guacimeta airport to look for an explanation. "I went to the Aena counter and they didn't know anything, they only had a statement from Spanair. But they didn't even know if they were going to refund my ticket, if they were going to relocate me... nothing. They had no news at all," she says. After that, she went to the Spanair counter. "Not even they could communicate with the company. They found out that they had been fired by colleagues at the airport and on television. Imagine the poor guys. And, despite that, they were very correct and did everything they could," says Sandra María Rivas. "For the role they had, I can't complain about the attention I received from the Spanair workers."
Refund the ticket
Sandra didn't even have to ask the company for a complaint form. The company's employees provided it to her directly. But she didn't get any kind of solution. No one knew what to tell her. "The only thing I could do was buy a new ticket with Air Europa. It cost me 52 euros on a direct flight. The only option Spanair gave me was to take another flight with another company that had three stopovers, I had to spend the night in Madrid, and it cost 260 euros," she says.
"I hope that Spanair reaches an agreement and refunds the tickets. I even had insurance contracted. But it's useless, because it doesn't cover the company's bankruptcy, it only covers the cancellation of the flight. And I say: Haven't they cancelled it for me? And I also demand that they refund me the Air Europa ticket, because I had to buy another one because of them," she requests.
Sandra is "very heated" with this whole story. "They have ruined my plans. I have spent a lot of phone and time. No one has sent me an email to tell me that the flight had been cancelled. It's a disgrace," she denounces.
Connectivity problems
This Lanzarote native says that air connectivity could become a problem for Lanzarote. "We Canarians don't have facilities to leave here, only by air. The boat doesn't leave the island every day. They are cancelling routes, such as Air Europa to Barcelona. We are becoming more and more isolated," Sandra laments.
With the closure of Spanair, a daily route to Madrid has also been eliminated, which transported about 2,100 passengers a week. The company also operated from Guacimeta with Barcelona and Bilbao but only in summer. "It caught us by surprise," acknowledged the Tourism Councilor of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, Ástrid Pérez, who was "concerned about the island's connectivity." However, she was confident that "the lost slots will be occupied by other airlines." "This is a setback and I hope that there is no other company that suspends its activity as Spanair has done, because then we would have a serious connectivity problem," Pérez said.
The councilor was confident that other companies, such as Iberia's new bet, that is, Iberia Express, or Vueling will take over the routes that Spanair has left. The same is expected by the president of Aetur, Susana Pérez, who also considers that the cessation of Spanair is "bad news" for the island of Lanzarote. "There is a deficit of routes with the Peninsula and this further increases the problem," she said, while inviting other companies to take over the cancelled routes, because they are routes "with a high percentage of occupancy."
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["The passengers were in solidarity. They lost a flight and we may lose a job"->65335]
