The indefinite cancellation of flights over European airspace has started driving desperate travellers to take unimaginable routes that are currently the only option to attend a funeral, wedding or an all-important meeting.Since Saturday night, travel agents have been receiving SOS messages from stuck passengers to somehow get a seat on any plane to Athens, Moscow, Istanbul or Tashkent so that they can then take combinations of rail-road-and-sea routes to mainland Europe. A sizable number of US-bound passengers supposed to fly via Europe are now requesting for seats on Southeast Asian carriers to fly across the Pacific to San Francisco or Los Angeles and then wing their way to New York or Chicago. Similar to flying from Delhi to Lucknow via Bangkok! Travellers are facing real hardship as seats are simply not available even at very high fares. “In the past 24 hours, we have sent a Delhiite to Europe via Chicago. He flew non-stop to US and then took a Spanish carrier Iberian to Madrid. An economy-class passenger on a European carrier had bought a Delhi-New York return ticket for Rs 45,000. With flight cancelled, he had to buy a first-class ticket on a Gulf carrier for Rs 4.05 lakh,” said Benson Samuel of Riya Travels.
With the rail-road-ferry option emerging as the only ones to reach nerve centres like London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna or Frankfurt, people are now desperate to fly to Athens on any Gulf carrier. Others are trying to fly Aeroflot to Moscow and then take these options.
From Moscow, people have the option of taking the Russian Rail sleeping-car to Cologne, a journey that takes two nights and passes through Belarus, Poland and Germany.