After Emirates airline lost our bags on 16 April 2024 I spent a week wearing the same clothes until I got home on April 22. To date, Emirates has offered no help or compensation, apart from a hotel voucher for two nights in Dubai and a McDonald’s meal worth £7.

The bags arrived just before noon on April 30, a full two weeks after they went missing and eight days after our return to England.

One of my frustrations was the fact that I knew where my bag was because I had an Air-tag inside my case. But Emirates staff I spoke with did not want to hear this fact. The bag sat in storage near me for three days before delivery. So much for “urgent”.

On April 16 my friend Julia and I waited almost six hours in transit in Dubai before our flight to Istanbul was cancelled. The cancellation announcement came as we stood at the jet’s door, about to take our seats.

We returned to the boarding gate where staff told us to go to the Emirates hotel desk. Emirates refused to release our hold bags. At the desk we waited another six hours to get an accommodation voucher before being put on a bus to a hotel, the Capthorne Airport Hotel, owned by Emirates.

The hotel lobby was chaotic. We got a room at 1.45am.

A storm the previous day had dumped about five inches (13 cm) of rain on the region, causing floods in the city. I noticed leaking roofs in the airport arrivals area.

It became apparent the airline had no recovery plan because for the next several days chaos was the normal state of play.

My travel agent told me she could not change our booking because Emirates had taken control of our ticket. The only option was to contact Emirates. But no-one answered the phone. All other forms of communication such as SMS, email and WhatsApp did not work. A classic Catch-22.

On April 17 we returned to the airport with new boarding passes but men in white robes and police in green uniforms refused to let us — and tens of thousands of others — into passport control.

The departure hall filled with people, all with boarding passes and all cramming forward to get through passport control to reach their boarding gate. I feared for the children and old folk in the crowd. I have video and will upload it here when I get a better Internet connection.

The airline banned locals from check-in that day, to try to reduce the number of people in the departure hall. But it appears many arrived anyway. People with influence always get what they want in Dubai. The rest of us who play by the rules suffer.

The only option after being refused boarding was to return to the Capthorne. But the hotel refused to honour the second night of our voucher until I could prove our flight had been cancelled.

This led to a stand-off between the Emirates airline desk and the hotel reception. Despite being next to each other, neither would communicate with the other. It was only when a visiting politician on our flight confirmed that we’d been refused the right to board that the hotel relented.

Meanwhile, crowds of refused passengers kept arriving from the airport. Video of the chaotic hotel lobby will appear here soon.

I personally experienced an Emirates staff person at the Capthorne lying to my face when he denied telling us to go to the airport. That same man has insisted we go to the airport earlier that day.

That night I showered fully clothed, hung my clothing near the window and dried them with a hairdryer in the morning. It became part of a routine over the next few days.

On the morning of April 18 we returned to the airport about 9am. Chaos. The number of people in the departure hall was even larger. People had slept on the hard floor. Some occupied the electric cars previously made available for people with restricted mobility. It became impossible to move because of the crush of people.

Vending machines were empty. Any airport employee with water was swamped by people. The air-con struggled. We sweated. 

The crowd grew and surged. We fled in fear to the back of the hall and waited. The lack of communication was frustrating. Dubai is a “silent” airport so no public address system was available. Electronic information boards said nothing apart from telling locals not to check in.

We managed to get through immigration about 5pm. We waited at the boarding gate on our boarding pass. But Emirates had changed our boarding gate but did not tell us! No staff were available to ask for clarity. Indicator boards appeared frozen. Again, crowds made it almost impossible to move.

We found the correct gate. A sole woman staff member heroically organised boarding for a full flight. She filtered people through one by one, with huge crowds pressing against the counter.

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 10.45am. We were allowed to board at 8.30pm, but the aircraft sat on the tarmac until 10.10pm. We received no communication from the flight deck apart from when the pilot offered a desultory sorry as he explained that floods had meant staff could not get to work.

At this point it had not rained for 48 hours; the skies were blue and the roads clear.

Our only link with Emirates was via email updates about departure delays. I received 11 updates about our 10.45am flight before we started boarding. The absence of leadership at the airport was apparent. It became clear the airline did not have a plan. The sycophantic praise for Dubai’s ruler on Facebook for “expert” handling of the situation was a sad contradiction to what actually happened.

Aboard our flight, the pilot promised to “burn fuel” to get us to our Istanbul destination as quickly as he could. The journey took one hour longer than usual. We arrived at 2am local time (one hour time difference) but our bags did not. Emirates had had 12 hours to put our bags onto the flight but that did not happen. We completed a lost-bag form at 3.45am, along with scores of other folk.

We spend four days in Istanbul waiting for our bags to arrive. They never did. I purchased clean underwear. I also bought a new shirt because the shirt I wore when I first boarded an Emirates flight on April 16 had disintegrated with the constant washing in the shower.

We departed Istanbul on April 22 and arrived at London Gatwick the same day.

In that time we had no communication from Emirates about our bags. A feature of the week was the silence from Emirates.

The only statement I saw was from Emirates boss Tim Clark, who admitted the response had been “far from perfect”. A masterpiece of understatement.

These events I relate above represent one tiny example of a massive public relations disaster for Emirates. Almost all of the hundreds of people I encountered said the same thing: “Never again will I fly Emirates”. 

One politician who endured five days at an airport hotel in Dubai, whose bag had been lost on a previous flight, summarised the situation succinctly: “A total shit-show.”

I tried several times to lodge a complaint on the official Emirates site. But the site remains frozen. Another sad indictment of an appalling situation the airline wants to pretend did not happen.