Egypt Air and NCAA’s sophistry

April 2024. My wife and I had purchased an Egypt Air London – Lagos flight ticket, departing April 12, 2024 to return via Air Maroc April 20, 2024. As it turned out, nothing could have prepared us for the experience. Arriving on time at the Egypt Air check-in counter on the day of the travel, we were refused check-in by Egypt Air officials at the counter because, according to them, our return ticket via another airline, Royal Air Maroc was not acceptable! Of course, we – my wife and I - initially thought it was a joke! We pleaded with just about anyone in sight, made supplications and sought explanations from those gods behind the counter, particularly since the rules, to our understanding, only required a valid return ticket. Still, no dice.

Finally, we sought, and later met their airport manager. It was the same story. In fact, we were at some point, ignored. Perhaps out of pity, one of their officials made an unsolicited ‘advice’: to immediately make a supplementary booking and payment for a return leg on their airline that would cost nearly two million naira – if we wanted to make the flight. Yes; he said we could later ask for a refund from Royal Air Maroc, in case we are so minded!

With barely 90 minutes to departure time and with no signs of any breakthrough, things got really desperate. In fact, to miss the flight was to miss the programme on which we had invested months of planning and exertions! At that point, I had to turn to my son in England to arrange the supplementary ticket from his end, which he did at a hefty sum of £700!  That experience, suffered some two years ago informed of my resolution never to touch the airline with a hundred-metre pole even if it was the only airline left on the planet!

Fast forward to April 16. Thanks to Citizen Adenike Daramola Joondeph, the same airline, Egypt Air is back in the news for the very same, heinous reasons.  Save for minor details, her experience is in every material particular similar to our 2024 experience. In her case, the first leg of her journey had Barcelona, Spain as destination was via Egypt Air; the second leg with Lagos as destination was via the United States carrier – United Airlines, via its code-sharing partner, Turkish Airlines.

And just like we experienced, the airline refused to check her in. However, unlike yours truly which chose to the path of restitution through our travel agent, the woman opted for a more potent weapon: Using the World Wide Web to call out a service provider whose understanding of its duty to the consumer borders on the heinous and the utterly reprehensible.

Yet, unlike some Nigerians, who in her shoes, would have created a scene and thereby draw attention, she did the most educated thing in the circumstance: put out a video detailing her experience of perceived ill-treatment by Egypt Air officials, going as far as raising questions for the airline, bordering on its primary duty of informing its patrons if indeed such rules exist, and possible ending the sale of a one-way ticket, as against being told at the point of checking in.

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Although clearly frustrated by perceived ill-treatment, she was neither rude nor belligerent in the video; aside doubting that the rules which the airline invoked actually exist in the first place, she did a public duty of requiring the airline to publish them, even in fine prints, if only to save potential flyers such embarrassment. For patriotic duty, she has had to be thrown under the bus by the agency whose duty it was to provide her respite. 

Understandably, some Nigerians might wonder if things would have been different had Citizen Adenike chosen to lay her case before the body in charge of such complaints – the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), instead of going ‘global’ as she apparently preferred. Agreed; they may have a point. Unfortunately, her fears may have since been borne out given the rather hasty, unhelpful and patently one-sided interjection by the agency’s director of public affairs and consumer protection, Michael Achimugu over the course of the weekend.

Surely, if the latter barely understood the issues which underlay Adenike’s outrage, his pontifications not only missed the mark, but smacks of betrayal. While he neither addressed the main issue at stake – which is why a return ticket by another airline will not suffice for the airline to board her in that particular circumstance – he went on a needless voyage of sophistry, rationalisation and cant, leaving the perceptible Nigerians wondering on whose side he was on in a matter as straightforward as the one in question.  

Achimugu claims in one breath to have spoken to the officials of the airline. He further claimed, based on the judgment of the airline, that there was no rancour. Talk of an individual whom the airline had only moments before, prevented from boarding her scheduled flight leaving the scene happy enough to make a video of it!

However, that is not even the worst part of the account of his interaction with the airline. He seems to believe that the passenger – a frequent traveller, did not know the difference between the code-share operated by United Airlines and that operated by the German carrier, Lufthansa! Little wonder that his update, which was supposed to provide further clarification, was as far as rationalisations go, a colossal disaster: Egypt Air claimed that the passenger on a United Airlines’ code-shared flight with Turkish Airlines would require a United States visa for a flight with no US touch point!

To imagine that this yarn is what Egypt Air sold to the head of NCAA’s public affairs and consumer protection directorate and that he actually swallowed it hook line and sinker is worse than tragic! Surely, Egypt Air’s public affairs department couldn’t have done a better job of clearing their mess. 

I’m sure Nigerians will be interested in how my matter with Egypt Air ended. Like I said before, it ended there and then – not before a formal complaint to the United Kingdom based travel agency which booked the ticket. Although the travel agency wouldn’t dwell on which party it was that was at fault, they understood my point enough to offer a modest compensation. It is hard to see anything happening in this direction to our national – Adenike Daramola Joondeph – in the hands of Egypt Air and its code-share partner in infamy, the NCAA.