Guest Post:
There were eight of us, four adults and four children flying from Los Angeles to England for our annual trek back to my homeland from my adopted country. The group consisted of my family and my brother’s family who were in one big excitable group, looking forward to a white Christmas in my hometown of Leeds. Everything was running smoothly until we got to our connecting flight at La Guardia airport in New York…THEY HAD CANCELLED OUR FLIGHT!!!
The following story tells the woeful tale of a big family stuck in a drafty airport with nowhere to sleep and eat for a 23 hour period and how we could’ve better dealt with and prepared for this emergency.
When we learned that our flight was cancelled back to the UK there was utter mayhem among the many passengers. There were a lot of frayed tempers due to the lack of information from the airline reps who were not telling us when (or if) we would be put on another flight! Among our own family unit, some of the adults were getting “snappy”. My brother in particular was getting very annoyed with the reps and our predicament. This made our 4 young girls very nervous indeed – especially after seeing an adult losing their cool! Two of our kids were uncontrollably crying at the thought of never making it to England. In their mind, Christmas was ruined!
The fact is that this is not an uncommon occurrence. If you ever travel by airline then chances are you will be delayed for a few hours, or in our case, a whole day. This brings me to my first tip:
1. Keep Calm and Carry On
If you’ve got kids then getting upset will only upset your children and make THEM extremely anxious and upset. This is a smart rule for any families in a mini-crisis. Even if you are worried you should “fake it” in front of the kids. Dealing with 4 crying children will only make matters worse for you and for them. Some things are simply out-of-your-control. For your children’s sake, keep calm and carry on!
We eventually found out that our flight was going to be delayed for 23 hours! This meant that we would have to either stay at the airport overnight, or brave the wilds of New York City to get a hotel for the night (paid for by the airline, of course.) This brings me to my next tip:
2. Take the Hotel Deal!
If the airline offers you a hotel for the night, take the deal. We didn’t, preferring instead to “wait it out” at the airport to avoid the hassle of getting a big group across town to a hotel and back to the airport the next morning. However difficult it may be to taxi a bunch of tired and cranky children to a hotel for the night, the alternative is to try and get those same tired and cranky children to sleep on uncomfortable airport seating. We actually ended up putting blankets on top of the horrible carpet on the hard airport floor for them to sleep on! This was a poor decision.
The other reason why we should’ve taken the deal was because we encountered some other nightmare problems with the kids to make our uncomfortable journey even more difficult. My daughter got sick from the travelling and started to make a mess from both ends (my poor, little sweetheart!) Imagine being in an airport and having to clean up vomit and other mess from clothes, and then having to put them back on them again! I had to resort to putting my daughter in my big hooded top to hide her dignity and washing her clothes out in the airport sink. It took me 4 hours to dry off all her wet clothes in the tiny hand dryer in the men’s room!!! It was a nightmare!
I feel that this could’ve been avoided if we’d put a few essentials in our hand luggage. This next tip could save family travelers a lot of misery on future flight delays:
3. Prepare For the Worst with Carry-on Essentials
Before this trip, I considered things like passport, phone, a good book and other carry-on items to be essentials. I would now add the following things to my carry on essential list, to pack for every flight:
- Change of clothes for your children – even if you don’t have to deal with sickness, your children will feel so much better having fresh clothes to wear after being delayed for an extended time
- Plastic bags to put dirty clothes in
- Plenty of food and snacks – this may sound obvious but prepare for the worst with enough sandwiches and snacks to last for a few days. You don’t want to have to resort to the expensive airport vendors and anyway, they don’t stay open all night!
- Games puzzle books, and other entertainment devices – We had a portable DVD player with us that was pretty much a lifesaver when it came to occupying the kids in this difficult situation. But we could’ve benefited from a few other puzzles and games to keep their minds off the situation.
- Tylenol (Calpol), headache tablets, Imodium – these are some essential medications that would’ve relieved the situation we were in for both kids and adults. Make sure you put them in a clear baggy and the liquid volume for the medication is no more than 3.4 oz.
- Pillow pets or other large stuffed toys – they’re big, bulky and annoying for us adults to carry but these things were lifesavers when we needed something for our girls to sleep on! Plus, they’re great for the plane journey!
Needless to say we survived this awful 23 hours of sickness and crankiness last year and we had a great Christmas in the Motherland. Luckily, we were only delayed for a day (I realize that there are people who have been delayed for days in airports so we got off quite lucky in the end.) Hopefully you will learn something from this story and prepare yourself better for these little hiccups on our travels that are sent to test us!
Ben Fellowes is an Englishman living in California who writes on various topics that include travel, design, and marketing. He is the current blog writer for Next Day Flyers in the US.
