My epic 6-hour flight delay with Ryanair in Croatia

Hello and Здраво! One of the reasons why I love going traveling is that each journey often gives me so many stories to tell and I have just been on a double city break to Osijek in Croatia and Novi Sad in Serbia - neither are big cities to be honest (Novi Sad population 300,000 and Osijek 100,000 only), so it was more like a double town break. Nonetheless, I am very happy that I have managed to visit my 74th country the moment I had crossed over the border to Serbia - I will talk more about Serbia in another post but let's begin with the story about my flight back from Osijek to London given that it is one of the smallest airports I had ever been to: there is only one gate, one baggage belt, one X-ray machine for passengers at security and two booths for passport control. There are only two toilets, one in the main arrivals hall and one on the airside, in the waiting room by the gate. There is only a tiny shop in the departures area and two bars - one in the main arrivals area and one in the departure area. On busy days, the airport gets three flights a day but on some days like Saturdays, there are no flights so the airport is not even open on Saturdays. The main gates will be locked and the lights will be off. There is no public transport to this airport from Osijek city, you have to take a taxi if you don't have your own car. The airport is about 3 km from the nearest village of Klisa, but that is just a tiny farming village. I really  adore Croatia, I even speak some Croatian (enough to communicate with locals who don't speak a word of English) and am very fond of Croatia in general as it is such a charming country. Osijek is the fourth largest city of Croatia and whilst it was charming, it felt a lot more like a rather small town rather than a proper city. It had a charming city centre where all the tourist attractions were located and plenty of bland sprawling suburbs. Of course, you can see plenty of videos and photos from this trip on my Instagram as always. But let's begin right at the very end, with the story of my flight home from Osijek airport  - this is a fine example of how everything that can go wrong went all very wrong in the same evening.

The budget airline Ryanair operates a flight from London Stansted airport to the town of Osijek in Eastern Croatia twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays - that was why I thought, hey, I could fly out on a Friday and return on the Monday, making it a nice long weekend break there. The flight back on Monday is scheduled to depart Osijek at 9 pm and arriving back at London Stansted at 10:30 pm, allowing me to spend all of Monday sightseeing before arriving at the airport after 7 pm and still arriving back in London early enough for me to get the last train back home - what could go wrong? Oh you'll be amazed. So when I left Osijek for the airport, I checked that my flight was scheduled and it was showing on the website that it was on time. However, as I got to the airport, I noted that there was a slight delay of 45 minutes and my new departure time was 7:45 pm. Okay, this is quite normal - flights rarely operate on time and a small delay is no big deal. However, I then checked my Ryanair app and it showed the new departure time to be 11:15 pm which was much later, so I went to ask the staff at the airport if they knew anything. I had to ask in English and Croatian but I got the same answer in both languages, "we don't know, but I think the app is probably more accurate." I had to ask in Croatian as the guys were incredibly unhelpful in English - I suspected it might have been the language barrier but they were equally unhelpful in Croatian. I resigned myself to the fact that I was definitely going to miss the last train back into central London when I landed in Stansted airport, but I wanted to know what caused that long delay - the staff at Osijek airport didn't know and didn't care. So I looked up the outgoing flight from London Stansted to Osijek on Flight Radar 24 and to my shock, it did take off slightly late but it had barely made it as far as the English coast off the town of Clacton before circling a few times to dump fuel and returning to Stansted airport. I got curious as to why it did that. Was it a disruptive passenger? Or was it some kind of mechanical fault with the engine, - if so, then how long would it take for them to fix it? 

Enough passengers did exactly what I had done and some of them started pestering the staff to contact Ryanair in London to find out what the heck was going on. There were a few characters here - so there were these three guys who looked like brothers. One was in a white T-shirt, one was in a black T-sirt and the third in a brown T-shirt, all three looked extremely bored and couldn't care less about what happened. They had that look on their faces which said, "I hate my job, I couldn't care less if your flight is cancelled, I just wanna go home as soon as possible and go to bed. That's how little I care, fuck you, you passengers can all just fuck off and I don't give a shit what the hell happens with your flight. I am not paid enough to give a fuck." Then there was this very attractive lady whom I shall call Blondie, she had beautiful long blonde hair. She was friendly enough and was trying her best in a difficult situation but whenever anyone asked her a question, she was like, "sorry I'm new here, I don't know, let me try to get my colleagues to help you." I bet she was thinking, "look at me, I am tall, blonde, sexy, glamorous, gorgeous and I should be cabin crew serving champagne in first class on the next flight to New York or Paris, instead I am stuck here in a tiny airport in Osijek dealing with this situation - fucking hell, I hate my life, someone get me out of here already." So in addition to the bored brothers and Blondie, we had this older fat lady who wore glasses - she was clearly the most senior person in charge of the airport, so I shall call her Ms Boss. I reckon the bored brothers and Blondie had put enough pressure on her to do something about the angry passengers, so finally she made an announcement. There was no PA system or anything like that, it was just Ms Boss standing in front of the one departure gate and shouting for everyone to listen please. "First I do in Croatian, then English version will follow so for our friends who speak English so please bear with me, okay? I'm sure you all want to know what is going on and I have some information for you; could you all keep quiet please, so everyone here can hear me clearly." 

She explained that there had been a technical fault that had occurred when the plane was refuelling at Stansted: refuelling is a function carried out by the ground staff at Stansted airport rather than Ryanair and they didn't close the fuel cap properly after the refuelling was done, hence the tank couldn't be pressurized properly after take off. Unfortunately, that error was only discovered after take off and the pilot had no choice but to dump the fuel over the North Sea off the coast of Clacton and divert back to Stansted airport. I rolled my eyes at the environmental damage done. The plane did manage to refuel properly upon its return to Stansted and by now, we were all tracking its progress to Osijek on Flight Radar 24. In the meantime, Ms Boss organized some refreshments for us which took the form of a sandwich from the local chain Mlinar. I was hoping for something better than a sandwich but at least it was a decent baguette filled with salami, cheese and salad but we had to sign for it as Ms Boss made sure that nobody could take more than one. I asked Blondie if they were all the same and she replied, "I don't know - do you require a vegetarian sandwich? Shall I get one of my colleagues to help you?" At which point I thought, girl you can't even handle the distribution of sandwiches, I am glad Ms Boss is in charge here and not you. The incoming from London took off again at about 7:55 pm local time and  it finally landed at Osijek at 22:35 pm. Now there were young four children in the departure area who had never been on a flight before and they were so excited for the occasion - the delay didn't seem to faze them and they were the ones who were most excited when they saw the plane land. They were shouting, "Avion, avion! Yes the Croatians use the French word avion for plane in Croatian. So as the passengers from the incoming flight finally disembarked from the flight, we were finally given the all clear for boarding. I couldn't wait to get on the plane as the airport was uncomfortably hot - summers in Croatia can be very hot and there wasn't air-conditioning in the terminal building. There were also so many mosquitoes in that airport and I was getting bitten all over. Thus most of us were only too glad to get on that plane at last.

So I settled into my seat, tried to make myself comfortable and fall asleep as it was already about 11:35 pm at that point, then the pilot made an announcement. "I'm afraid I have some bad news. We hit a small animal upon landing at Osijek, it may be something like a rabbit and we have to go through the standard procedure we follow for a bird strike as bits of the animal may have ended up in the engine. I need to find an engineer to do an inspection before we are cleared to fly again, I have been told that one is not available locally in Osijek but I am on the case. In the meantime, please take all your bags and disembark, you will be more comfortable waiting in the terminal building as I have no idea how long this will take." I just looked around me in disbelief, I was sitting beside a British man who was losing his temper and he started yelling at the cabin crew, but there were others who were already trying to ask them questions as well. As I made my way off the plane, one member of the cabin crew apologized to me and I reassured her, "none of this is your fault, you don't need to apologize to me." She replied, "yes I know, but people in this situation always get angry and blame me. Thank you for being understanding, I appreciate it." So we all had to return to the mosquito-infested terminal building where I managed to find one of the few power sockets available for me to charge my phone - it was going to be a long night, a very long night. I saw the bored brothers, Ms Boss and Blondie still hanging around there, all looking especially pissed off that the passengers had returned to the terminal building. I bet they had hoped that they could turn the lights off, lock up and go home but now they were once again stuck with us. As we had all cleared immigration already and the border staff had already gone home, we were all stuck on the small airside area in the airport and the smokers were not even allowed to go to the carpark to have a smoke - they weren't supposed to smoke on the runway side of the building but at this point, so many of them had started smoking and the bored brothers weren't prepared to tell them to stop. So the time at this point was already 12:05 am and I thought, never mind an aviation engineer - there isn't even any kind of Asian restaurant in Osijek. I couldn't even get Chinese food there, there's zero chance of finding what we needed locally. 

At about 12:25 am, Ms Boss appeared and once again, took up position at the departure gate with some news. She started off in Croatian but never got to the English, as the angry locals started shouting at her and it became downright chaotic. I picked up enough to know that we were faced with a much, much longer delay and I looked at my app - I had just been given a notification that our new departure time was estimated to be 2:30 am at this point. I then turned to a Croatian woman we had been talking to for a while and asked if she could translate the information as I wasn't fluent enough in Croatian to pick up all the details. The kind lady explained that a local engineer wasn't found in Osijek and they had tried all the other cities with bigger airports in Croatia like Zagreb, Pula, Rijeka, Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik but none of them had an engineer available and awake at this hour. They then tried all the other airports where Ryanair had a presence in this part of Balkans but again, no luck - most of them were already closed at this hour and offered an engineer first thing in the morning. The biggest international airports in the region were in either Austria or Italy and they managed to get hold of one engineer on duty at Bergamo airport, which is outside Milan. My husband was like, surely he is going to drive here, no? They're gonna fly one engineer all the way from Milan to Osijek just to do an inspection? We checked on Google maps and it would in fact that the engineer nearly 13 hours to drive from Bergamo airport to Osijek airport and thus flying was the only sensible option. We then checked on Flight Radar 24 and we noted that a flight had been scheduled from Bergamo to Osijek at 1:00 am and they were really going to use an Boeing 737 to fly just that one engineer to us - the flight time was about 1 hour 15 minutes so at least Bergamo wasn't that far away if you could fly! That flight from Bergamo finally left at 1:34 m, by this time, many passengers were already getting our information from Flight Radar 24 instead of Ms Boss or any of the local staff. I did some quick calculations, if the flight left at 1:34 am, then it would arrive at Osijek around 2:46 am, making our 2:30 am departure impossible at this stage. The Croatian lady did tell us that Ms Boss did announce that we were all entitled to €400 in compensation as this delay had exceeded 5 hours. 

When Ms Boss tried to do an English version, she was constantly interrupted by a very angry Croatian woman who did a bilingual Croatian-English rant at her - this angry local was just venting her anger at this point and Ms Boss patiently allowed her to have that chance to vent her anger. Finally, Ms Boss turned to that lady and said something to the effect of, "are you finished? Good, then I may continue." To my surprise, at about 2:35 am, Ms Boss announced that we were now boarding and to make our way to the plane. I suppose they wanted everyone on board, seated with seat belts on whilst the engineer did the vital inspections - the moment we got the all clear, the plane could go as soon as possible. So we all boarded and literally watched the flight from Bergamo land at 2:45 am from the windows of the plane. This incident then happened and I hate to make fun of cabin crew but I have to share this - remember the very angry British man I sat next to? He asked the air stewardess how long the inspection would take and it was evident that she had no freaking clue whatsoever - look, her job is to sell you drinks and duty free items on the flight, what the heck would someone like her know about something technical like the inspection process after a possible bird strike? She could tell you how much a can of Sprite or a ham and cheese sandwich would cost on this flight but that would be the extent of knowledge. She did reply, "I think about 30 minutes or so." Right at that very moment, the pilot made an announcement that the inspection has begun, if the engineer gives the all clear that the animal (presumably a rabbit) didn't get sucked into the engine, the whole process would be over in five minutes. If the animal did indeed damage the engine, then the assessment about how much damage was done could take quite a lot longer so we were just hoping for the best whilst expecting the worst. The angry British passenger than yelled at the air stewardess, "you were just making it up! You had no idea! You don't know anything!" She rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders and replied, "I was just managing your expectations. If you thought it took 30 minutes but it was done in 15 minutes, then you would be pleasantly surprised. If you thought it would take only 15 minutes but it took 30 minutes, then you would get angry with us." He then said some awful insults to her which I shan't repeat here, but I did think, "you were asking the wrong person for information, you were the idiot totally barking up the wrong tree, so don't blame her for not having the answers that you were looking for." 

At which point, I thought, that's it, I'm not sitting next to you. You're an asshole and I don't want to be around people like you when I just want to have a peaceful flight. I knew that some passengers had chosen not to fly as they were entitled to a full refund so there were quite a few empty seats available on that plane at that point. So I just picked up my bag and moved to another part of the plane shortly before we took off at exactly 3:07 am - that's a full six hours seven minutes behind schedule. Most of the passengers on the flight were totally exhausted by this point so the flight was fairly uneventful as we were mostly asleep - thankfully the crew realized that and kept announcements to a minimum so we could all get some much needed rest on the flight back to London. I awoke as the plane landed at 4:20 am and it was freaky as the sun was already rising at that point. Yes, the sun rises very early in June in London given how far north we are, so there was light in the sky and I felt as if I had just travelled long haul from another continent despite the fact that the flight was just over two hours. By the time, I had disembarked and cleared immigration, it was already 4:50 am and I decided to wait for the first train at 6 am rather than take a bus back into London, given that the train is so much faster and I have a connection to my local station. Despite the exhaustion, I actually put that waiting time to good use as I had a work call with a client in Singapore who was happy to talk to me before she went for lunch. I was surprisingly awake for that call despite the fact that I have had less than two hours of sleep at that point, I didn't sleep at all in the airport and the only time I slept was on the short flight. I finally walked into my front door at 7:05 am, a good 13.5 hours after I had left central Osijek. That Tuesday was a write off as I had a quick wash and then collapsed into a deep sleep until mid-afternoon, when I forced myself out of bed but I decided that I simply couldn't just keep on sleeping if I didn't want to totally mess up my sleep pattern and end up with jet lag from this terrible night. So, that's my story of the incredibly delayed flight back from Osijek, but what lessons have I learnt from this episode? Here are 3 main lessons that I learned.

Lesson 1: Staff at small airports don't give a fuck as they're not paid enough to care. 

This shouldn't come as a surprise as they are not paid a penny more if they help you - there is really no incentive whatsoever to motivate them to even lift a finger in this situation. Just put yourself in the shoes of the bored brothers or Blondie for a moment: you work at Osijek airport, the job isn't well paid. This is because it is not a job that requires a degree, you probably need a working knowledge of English in order to communicate with foreign tourists, but you don't need a degree in English language in order to do that. They probably have a basic test of English whereby the applicant will need to answer simple questions like, "where is toilet? Do you know if the flight to London is delayed?" Furthermore, salaries are highest in the big cities like Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik and much lower in smaller towns. Thus someone like Blondie would probably be making around €800 to €1,000 a month. Whilst prices are usually a lot lower in a place like Eastern Croatia but still, that's not a well paid job. Blondie could have been trying so hard to help every passenger there or she could have disappeared into the office to hide there, she would have still been paid exactly the same; there simply isn't any kind of reward mechanism for her to try to do her job well at all. Contrast that to flying business class with Emirates, British Airways or Air France where you have dedicated staff to take care of business and first class passengers - the customer service experience is much better of course but you have paid so much more for that kind of customer service. British Airways doesn't fly to Osijek but they do go to Zagreb (which is the nearest big city to Osijek and also the capital of Croatia). A return ticket on business class would cost you about £1,300 whilst my return on Ryanair was just £60. Ryanair don't even have staff on the ground in Osijek airport and they rely on the local staff employed by the airport to handle the passengers on their flights. Thus in this kind of situation, bad service as there's no mechanism to pay for better service, such as when you can access an executive longue reserved for business/first class passengers at a big airport. Given how little Blondie is paid to do that job, can you really blame her for not giving a fuck? 

Lesson 2: Use the internet to find the information you need, don't rely on the underpaid local staff. 

So you're stuck at the airport and your flight is delayed - you want to know what the hell is happening but the ground staff couldn't be bothered to lift a finger. Well you can always use Flight Radar 24, it's a free website where you can track any flight in the world in real time - it is very useful and you will probably be able the information a lot faster than the airline staff this way. Using my experience as an example, I was stuck at Osijek airport and there were no planes on the ground there given that it was a tiny airport. We were waiting for a scheduled flight to come in from London in order for us to get back to London on that plane. Thus I needed to track the progress of that incoming flight from London to Osijek to figure out how long my delay was going to be. The information on Flight Radar 24 is updated to the minute, so you will know exactly what time a plane takes off and lands. The ground staff could of course pick up the phone and speak to a real human being to procure all that information for you, but as discussed previously, they are so poorly paid and unmotivated that they will never ever lift a finger to help you. Really, the two people in this story who had any useful information was Ms Boss and the pilot of the plane, all the other staff knew less than me as they weren't even on Flight Radar 24 to look up information on the situation. This reminds me of another situation from back in 2020, this was the first flight I took during the pandemic from London to Tallinn in Estonia, A passenger was very nervous when she noticed that the plane was very crowded, so she complained about it to the cabin crew and that was when I rolled my eyes, as if the cabin crew have any say about how full the plane is! No, the cabin crew are paid so little, they have to wear a freaking uniform to serve you coffee, as if they would be able to enter any kind of intelligent conversation about the airline's Covid policy and let's just say, even if they did try to engage you in that conversation, they still have absolutely no power or authority to do anything about the situation. Either speak to someone senior enough in charge, or look up the info that you need online.

Lesson 3: Know your rights, understand the procedure. 

As my flight originated from Croatia, I was protected by the EU regulation 261/2004 on the rights of passengers when their flights are delayed. It states that if passengers experience delays in excess of five hours that are due to the fault of the airline, then passengers will be entitled to financial compensation based on how long the flight is. I was actually very lucky that my flight was calculated to be exactly 1,534 km from Osijek airport to London Stansted, so it just crosses the threshold of 1,500 km and thus I would be entitled to a compensation of €400. However, that process needed to be handled through a claims procedure directly with the airline - Ms Boss wasn't going to hand out €400 in cash to every passenger on that plane, that's not how it works. There will be external agencies who will try to do this for you but there's really no need to use their services at all - the process is relatively easy. Either you are entitled to compensation - in which case, there is a simple online form for you to fill up or you are not, in which case the external agency would not be able to change that outcome. In the case of my flight, it could be argued that even though the refuelling mistake at Stansted was made by ground staff there working for Stansted airport rather than Ryanair, the pilots could have possibly spotted that mistake before take off. As for the rabbit strike incident at Osijek airport, if this had occurred at a much bigger airport, then there would have been enough technical ground staff at any time of the day or night to resolve the problem quickly but since the maintenance of the aircraft is ultimately the responsibility of the airline, then they have to bear the responsibility of the delay even if they did spend a ridiculous amount of money flying in an engineer all the way from Milan. Once again, if in doubt, look up the information online and don't get impatient with the (very, very poorly paid) ground staff in this kind of situation as there's no point in venting your anger on them. Ironically, when this compensation comes through, it would have covered not just the cost of my flights, but my AirBNB stays as well as the car rental, along with most of the meals we had on this trip - all in all, that massive delay resulted in me having my cheapest holiday ever. 

Finally, I want to finish with a few reassurances - for many years, I have enjoyed using cheap flights with a range of budget airlines to have amazing holidays and this was really the first time that I have had a delay long enough to entitle me to a compensation. Short haul flights within Europe with the British Airways isn't that different to be honest - you even have to pay for your own food and drink on most airlines anyway and it is only with longer flights that food and drink are offered for free. If there's a major problem, it is the business/first class passengers who get taken care of first and the economy class passengers have to wait their turn to get any kind of help from the ground staff. I was extremely unlucky that two things went wrong on my flight (the refuelling problems and the rabbit strike) but if only one of those things happened, the delay would have probably been more like two or three hours instead of six. The only way you're really only going to guarantee that you're treated like a VIP is if you were to buy a business class ticket and fly between two major cities like London and New York, then that way your airline will put you on the next available flight to get you to your destination (even if they have to use a different airline) and you can relax in the executive longue in the meantime - you'll never be treated like that in a tiny airport like Osijek but when we make plans to travel, we're counting on the fact that most of the time, there will be no major problems, I had absolutely no problems at all with my flight out to Osijek and will continue to use budget airlines to explore interesting places in Europe like that. Most of the time, we barely ever interact with people like Blondie and the bored brothers at airport, so the fact that they are incompetent and have a bad attitude really don't matter at all. They might have been there on the day I arrived in Osijek but the only two people I spoke to at the airport was the border control guy who checked my passport and the guy at the car rental company. Both interactions were very brief and uneventful. Of course, one of the reasons why my flight was so cheap is because staff at Osijek airport are so badly paid thus by that token, I got what I paid for and I was gambling that everything would be fine.

So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you ever had a really long delay to your flight before and what was the cause of it? How were you treated by the airline/airport staff when that happened? Did they take good care of you or did they leave you to fend for yourself? Have you ever met someone like Blondie or the bored brothers who are in a customer service role but paid way too little to be motivated enough to do anything at all? Have you ever used a tiny airport before? What is your overall experience like using budget airlines and what are your expectations when you book a cheap flight like that? Are you a fan of these budget airlines offering very cheap flights? Have you visited Croatia before and did you enjoy it? Would you fly there with Ryanair? Please do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.