“This is typical of a banana country. Here football takes precedence over everything and everyone,” protested on Saturday night one of the 80 passengers who had just lost their place on the last flight leaving Vigo bound for Madrid. The complaint at the claims counter of the Air Nostrum company described, between stupor and indignation, a surreal situation: minutes before, those passengers were queuing to board, but suddenly the airport’s public address system announced that a charter flight would take off first. operated by the same company and in which the Sevilla Fútbol Club team was preparing to travel, which had played that afternoon at the Balaídos stadium against Celta de Vigo. Two planes were waiting for both passengers, one next to the other, but the travelers going to Madrid were alerted when they saw that the football expedition was accessing not the charter but the commercial plane, which in theory was going to take them to the capital.
At that moment the public address system came on again to explain that the flight to Madrid had been cancelled. Someone decided that the aircraft that was going to fly that route would leave for Seville with the soccer team, and at half its capacity. The other plane, the charter one, which was the one initially planned for the players and which remained parked there, had suffered a breakdown and had been declared by Air Nostrum as “unfit to fly”. The company, which maintains a franchise agreement with Iberia for regional flights, assumes that the only thing they can do is apologize for what happened. “We deeply regret the harm caused to passengers by a regrettable error attributable solely to the Air Nostrum company. Next week, each of the passengers will be contacted to compensate them for the inconvenience caused,” they say in a statement.
Those affected were offered accommodation in a nearby hotel and were summoned at eight thirty in the morning this Sunday, again at the Vigo terminal, to travel by bus to Madrid, where they arrived after three in the afternoon. . “They told us that no planes were going to take off from Vigo on Sunday morning and that’s why we had to go by bus, but in the end one from Vueling left for Barcelona and another from Air Europa to Madrid,” says Lucía Lois, one of those affected. There were just over 40 people. The rest of the passengers looked for alternatives to try not to lose connections that in some cases were even transoceanic, and they grouped together in taxis on Saturday to brave the storm at dawn and travel the 600 kilometers that separated them from Barajas. The intention of the majority is to also join forces to present a collective claim to Air Nostrum that includes the payment of compensation.
The Sevilla footballers arrived at their homes at one in the morning and on Sunday morning they carried out, according to the club’s official channels, a “recovery training” in the sports city of the capital of Seville. On Wednesday they play a Champions League match in London.
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