So the PAL flight left Haneda on time at around 3.30pm Sunday, uneventful flight to Manila, landed at Terminal 1. Food was fine, French Chardonnay ok.
From there it got crazy. All those transferring to other flights were herded in and passports taken off us…. for some reason they needed to be photocopied. Staff were shouting, literally running from place to place carrying huge bundles of passports, nothing was clear about what would happen. We just knew we needed to get to Terminal 2. Eventually we were taken by bus there, with passports returned to us prior to getting on the bus, though we stood and waited for ages in some downstairs weird holding pen at the bottom of an escalator.
At that point, we picked up that we had to identify our luggage, open it so it could be swabbed and tagged. But there were people going to all different destinations so we were sent away and told to come back to do the luggage thing about 10pm. Some passengers didn’t get the memo at all about identifying luggage and only heard about it as they started to board the plane. One young woman literally ran off the plane to do the luggage identification after she had already boarded!
We had to pass through security screenings 3 times while in the transfer process!
From when we had the meal onboard at 4.30pm, til the next meal on the flight to Brisbane at 12.30pm, we hadn’t had as much as a glass of water. Virtually the whole 4 hours in transit was taken up by this ridiculous process. By the time we tried to buy something at the little kiosk, we were called to board.
Well, the consolation was that between the 4 adults traveling together, we had paid about $16 000 less than what the Qantas fares were. So maybe it was a small price to pay but surely PAL processes could be so much better. I felt sorry for the staff as well.
Is this the usual transfer process for PAL? I wouldn’t enjoy a second run at it!
