Sad to realise this was our last day in Oman. We’ve enjoyed our stay and will have to come back to do more. We breakfasted in the hotel and then went up and packed. Taxied to the airport at about 1115. Our flight to Heathrow was at 1425. Check in was a real bun fight. One long queue feeding about 10 check in desks for a whole range of flights. It was rammed. There was a huge school party ahead of us and they took up 4 check in desks for about 30 minutes. That didn’t help.
We’d had a problem with checking in online. Back in December we’d paid to choose our seats on all the flight legs and for this flight home we’d booked Speedy Disembarkation seats which were basically the row behind the bulkhead extra legroom row at the very front of Economy. We’d been allocated 21H and K. However when we tried to check in online we couldn’t get passed the bit where you choose a seat and it wasn’t showing us in our row 21 seats. We rang the call centre but got fobbed off. Anyway, when we got to the front of the line in the airport we explained the situation to the young lady and she looked at our tickets and confirmed we’d paid for 21 H and K but for some reason the system had dropped our allocation and sold them to someone else!! She went off and saw her supervisor but came back and reported that we were now in 27 D and E, not where we wanted to be at all and not what we’d paid extra for. She obviously wanted to help so I asked her if she could upgrade us. She got on the phone again and then said, she couldn’t put us in Business because it was full but she could give us two seats in row 20 the extra legroom bulkhead row. In fact she did better than that she gave us the middle section of 3 seats between the two of us, so we were pretty comfortable.
The flight was on time and pretty smooth. Food and drink were fine and I managed to sleep a reasonable amount. Got into Heathrow at 1830 but we sat just off the gate for about 20 minutes because the automatic gate guidance system had failed and they had to get a man with paddles to come and wave us in. Sigh…
It feels pretty cold after 6 weeks away. What a lovely time we’ve had in India and Oman.