One mother experienced a nightmare scenario when her teenage son got stranded in a foreign country. This all happened after an airline error. The 14-year-old was supposed to ride on Wizz Air. But the airline overbooked its flight.
"I am so lost for words," the mother, Arna, wrote in a Reddit post. She wrote that her son Alfred went to Rome, Italy with seven other teens and a chaperone for a fencing trip. They were supposed to return home to Iceland when the error occurred. The airline reported that they didn't have a seat for him despite the fact he already had a ticket.
"Due to a problem with online check-in he had to go to the check-in desk and pay extra for checking in there. He did not get assigned a seat," Arna explained on Reddit. "Once boarding was finished he was told he was bumped off due to overbooking." To make matters worse, all of his travel buddies had a seat, so they left on the airline flight without him.
Airline Strands Teen
The adult chaperon declined to give up her seat as well since that would leave the entire group unattended. "He [Alfred] was upset by the situation," Arna told the Mirror. "He was really, really frightened, I think. I think it just felt very, very unnerving and frightening for him."
To make a bad situation even worse, there wasn't another flight for a while. Wizz Air said they didn't have a flight to Iceland until the next week. "They offered absolutely no help in getting him on another flight the same day... and no understanding of how grave the situation was, to leave a 14-year-old alone stranded in a foreign country," she wrote on Reddit.
Wizz Air denied him any compensation for the flight. Fortunately, his mother said they bumped another couple from the flight. They helped look out for him during the situation.
"Luckily there was a couple bumped from the same flight who offered to sort of look after him," Arna recalled. "Otherwise, I'm not sure what I would have done. I would have probably flown over on the first available flight or contacted the Italian police."
Finally, Wizz Air agreed to book the couple and the teen on a very expensive flight to Iceland through Icelandic Air. The mother filed a formal complaint afterward.
