Holiday travel can turn from pleasure to pandemonium in a heartbeat. Choosing Aerosvit, one of Ukraine’s air carriers, is a sure way of maximizing that risk. Some problems can be overcome, however, if you’re ready to defend your rights Stalingrad-style.
My adventure with Aerosvit began in April 2011. Traveling to a friend’s wedding in Gdansk, Poland, I decided to scrimp on a ticket in favor of a better gift. The plan was simple: Fly Aerosvit from Kyiv to Warsaw and do the last leg of the journey by train.
I boarded the plane in high spirits and with a small delay but was soon surprised to learn that I would not be going to Warsaw. Instead, the staff informed, we would be flying to Krakow, 260 kilometers south of the Polish capital.
Aerosvit’s ploy quickly became clear. In what its press service later said was an isolated incident caused by a deficit of planes (from its partner airline Dniproavia, which operated the connection), the carrier decided to fly a marshutka-type route between Krakow, Warsaw, and Kyiv, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way.
I arrived six hours late on a 90-minute flight. Having missed the last train, I feverishly looked for an alternative, eventually finding a mini-van service that brought me to Gdansk, cramped and exhausted, at 5 in the morning. I vowed never to travel with Aerosvit again.
Thus, when buying tickets to travel home to Poland for Christmas, I decided to play it safe and opted for LOT, the Polish national airline.
But while the Warsaw-Gdansk leg of the journey was indeed serviced by LOT, the Kyiv-Warsaw part of the trip was to be operated by Aerosvit. To miss that detail was a big mistake.
Holiday travel can turn from pleasure to pandemonium in a heartbeat. Choosing Aerosvit, one of Ukraine’s air carriers, is a sure way of maximizing that risk.
I arrived at the airport three hours in advance, fingers crossed.
At the check-in, however, my significant other and I learned the flight “would not be leaving,” and that we should go to Aerosvit’s service center to find out what to do.
But the service center had no answers, only a further problem.
“Your flight is not at 13:55, but 12:55,” the lady said, helpfully. It was starting to get more surreal by the minute.
Back in September Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada voted to cancel winter time, only to change its mind a month later. Tickets purchased during the period in limbo now indicated the wrong flights time. Needless to say, neither LOT nor Aerosvit had deemed it important to instruct their customers though an email, or even an sms, as to what they should do. Their websites contained no trace of notices.
Luckily, our problem was not a lasting one. The 12:55 flight was delayed, then canceled, pushing all its passengers back to our flight, and us back to square one.
Neither airline would take responsibility for the problem, sending us back and forth. “It’s the operator’s responsibility,” claimed LOT. Meanwhile, Aerosvit persevered in their nonchalant disdain – they could not, and would not, do anything about the problem.
“Warsaw airport does not accept Aerosvit flights,” they explained, and shrugged. No wonder.
Before you wonder how Aerosvit would react to such an assault in the press, here is the answer from the press service: Warsaw did not accept Aerosvit flights because of a debt for navigational fees at the airport, but other passengers were later flown to Warsaw via LOT and a different Ukrainian company.
Asked what passengers should do in such cases, the press service advised to contact the service center.
Relief in my ordeal came in the form of a resourceful Kaliningrad resident, who explained that the only solution was to force the service center to give us a flight through another city. He had opted for Riga, with Air Baltic.
The new Terminal F has spruced up Boryspil’s international airport’s look, but has left organizational problems unchanged (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
The strategy paid off. “I’ll kill someone if you don’t get us to Warsaw today,” my girlfriend yelled while I worryingly eyed security personnel. And something seemed to click – and it wasn’t handcuffs on her lovely wrists.
Minutes later we received two tickets to Warsaw via Riga on a flight less than 30 minutes away, allowing us to make a connection to Gdansk on the same day.
After a race through check in, security, and customs, just four minutes before the gates were set to close, another problem emerged.
Despite a valid business-visa and all the necessary registrations, I was told that, due to new legislation, visas where no longer recognized as allowing visitors to stay over 90 days in any 180 day period. Violations result in a Hr 850 fine.
This is a familiar story most foreigners in Ukraine have come across. It results from a number of conflicting laws that virtually render visas useless if you overstay 90 days – or at least that’s the interpretation that passport control officials prefer.
They enforce this law particularly rigorously because it has “hard cash” scribbled all over.
Caught minutes before the flight, guess what option would most people take, if they are offered to pay or miss the plane? To offer an unusual solution to this question, you are highly recommended to come armed with the phone number of your embassy or lawyer.
For all this trouble, there was one silver lining in my trip through Boryspil: a Swiss army knife that I accidentally put in my hand luggage, was left there intact. Unlike my wallet.
Kyiv Post staff writer Jakub Parusinski can be reached at [email protected].
