Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast Friday the 8th of March.

One of those odd days where something happens early on and then really the rest of the day

kind of unravels. That's surely how it felt for the 342 passengers who were due last night,

Thursday night, to fly out of Barbados at the end of what I hope was a marvellous holiday.

There they were sitting on board the 2E Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Next stop, Gatwick. How marvelous.

Unfortunately, a ground service vehicle, I think one of the vehicles carrying disabled passengers,

actually struck the aircraft. There was an investigation. Eventually it was decided that the

aircraft would not be able to fly.

That's most regrettable. Of course, nobody ever wants that to happen. And it's one of those things where

well, stuff does happen. And then the airlines simply have to do their best. I've been stuck on a

two-e flight actually that had a technical problem in the

Dominican Republic and that was handled reasonably well. In this case though, well, the

passengers were kept on board the flight for about five hours and they were kept on it.

I am told because ground staff were trying to source hotel rooms and the airport operators

didn't want people off the plane until all the hotel rooms were ready.

Then, yeah, let's let them get off the plane.

We'll process them back again through immigration and then they'll's let them get off the plane, well, process them back again through

immigration, and then they'll be able to go off to their hotels and they can try again on Friday

night. Well, that's not quite what happened. They were eventually let off at 10 o'clock local time,

by that stage, of course, the early hours of the Friday morning in the UK.

And, well, people who had young families, people who had infirmities or mobility issues,

and indeed the crew were put up in hotels. But for everybody else, sorry, you're on your own, which is very

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