Herm; Thursday, 01 August, 2019

Given the time of the flight I’d booked lounge access for myself and had headed down to the airport over my lunchtime so that I could work from the lounge for the afternoon. I’d just logged off at the end of the day and was settling down with a bite to eat when the dreaded announcement came across the PA – would passengers travelling on the GR609 flight to Guernsey please come to the airline information desk.

I’d been checking during the day and I’d seen that Aurigny had had some problems with their Jet. It had got stuck in Gatwick for over two hours earlier in the day due to a fault that had eventually been fixed, but I didn’t think that was going to be an issue for me as I’d booked on the turboprop flight that was quite a bit cheaper as it takes nearly twice as long.

It turns out that the flights were in such a mess that, rather than having two flights leave Gatwick within minutes of each other, they would just cancel the turbo-prop flight and redistribute the passengers over the 16:25 flight that was now leaving around 18:15 and the 19:00 flight which had been delayed to 21:00, and that’s why they needed the turboprop passengers back at the airline desk.

Thankfully, I’d only booked a hand luggage ticket and with no hold luggage, and having been through so early, I was the right side of the cut-off line for passengers to be transferred onto the earlier flight. It did mean that I had to go through the whole rigmarole of being decontrolled – through immigration, baggage reclaim, the red channel at customs, and back out to the checkin desks to pick up a new boarding card, before repeating the whole security screening process again to get back to the lounge. In total it took nearly 90 minutes from the initial PA to making it back into the lounge, and then a few minutes later down to the gate.

We boarded and the flight eventually departed 25 minutes after my original departure time, but a good 2 hours late for most of the passengers. However, due to the fact I’d been transferred onto the jet it meant the total flight time was a little over 30 minutes rather than the 70 or so that the turboprop does the flight in, so bizarrely – despite all the delays and messing around – I actually arrived in Guernsey 5 minutes ahead of when I should have done.

Seated in row 1 and with just hand luggage I was one of the first off of the plane and just 90 seconds after stepping off of the plane I was loading my luggage into the boot of a taxi and heading my way over to my hotel for the night.

I checked into the hotel, dropped my bag off, and then headed into the hotel restaurant for dinner.

I’d booked the hotel entirely at random on hotels.com as it was close to the airport and the room was quite cheap, it turned out that I’d also managed to book a hotel with a first class restaurant. Dinner was amazing with delicious food and outstanding service.

After a very pleasant dinner I wandered over to the bar to grab a final drink for the evening and was able to sit out on their patio, overlooking their pool, in the dying evening light with a pint of a local beer and all the stress of the journey over faded away.

As the last of the light died away I headed back to my room and turned in for the night.