Bargain airline or not so much

We recently took a family vacation during my wife’s and daughter’s spring break. My wife is a teacher and my daughter attends a K-4 class, both at Saipan International School. Since my wife’s parents were visiting us, they also joined us on our vacation with our son, who is only 1.5 years old. Everything went great on our trip until we ran into Hong Kong Express, trying to get home.

We had a flight on Saturday evening to get home to Saipan and were running a little behind. Keep in mind that my father-in-law is a 69-year-old man who is fairly disabled as he walks with special feet braces and a cane (he also is a 27-year Army veteran). Since we were in Hong Kong, we used a shuttle to get to the Kowloon train station. From there we tried to check into our flight, only to realize that Hong Kong Express doesn’t check people into the train station due to “TSA regulations flying to U.S.” That being said, the gal told us to hurry up and get to the airport but she will call and tell them we are on the way. This is about an hour and 45 minutes prior to our flight so we all jumped on the train and loaded our luggage. It is, I believe, a 24-minute train ride so we arrived at the airport and immediately started looking for our ticketing counter.

We finally found an HK Express line that we thought was for Saipan with a line, so no big deal, right. This is just over an hour before our flight, so my wife finally walks around the line and asks if this is for Saipan. They told her no; they closed their ticketing line about 5 minutes ago and it was two carousels down. We immediately ran over there as now we are running actually really late and talked to a young gentleman to get our tickets and get home to Saipan. The young man tells us we cannot go home as they closed ticketing and we are going to have to find another way home. Again, keep in mind that we were a 69-year-old disabled man, an elderly woman, a 4-year-old, a 1.5-year-old, my wife, and me. We had a stroller and five bags, so not a huge hindrance but more than they wanted to deal with, obviously.

After he says this, I see that it is 8:33pm. Our flight leaves at 9:30. HK Express’ policy is they close ticketing one hour before. Keep in mind, they were supposedly called about 45 minutes prior of a large family with disabled and elderly people are on the way. But see that is why I write this to warn you all. HK Express knew we were on the way, knew we were a decent-sized group, knew there were young kids, knew there were elderly people, knew there was a disabled person, yet rather than helping, they closed ticketing early to avoid us (8:25 rather than the policy of one hour prior to 8:30). The other kicker to all this is they have no flights the next day either (fully booked) so we are forced to buy last-minute plane tickets though Seoul to Saipan for $3,600, hotel rooms at $180 a night (times two) and meals, etc. for another two days of travel as now we do not arrive until Monday afternoon instead of Sunday morning at (4:45 am)

Hopefully this experience never happens to any of you because the stress and financial burden to our family was huge. We both missed additional time at work, we all suffered through an additional 30-plus hours of in and out of airports and airplanes. No biggy for young adults but really hard on small kids and elderly people.

So before you book your next flight, whether to Hong Kong or anywhere, make sure you pick an airline that will treat you as a human and not a sheep. From our experience, HK Express doesn’t appreciate elderly people, disabled people, families with young children, and would rather reject service to customers than help people in need.

And truly, we didn’t save that much money using HK Express versus other airlines. In the end, it cost us a lot more in money, time, and stress. Keep in mind I contacted them, they did apologize and stated they wish they could have done more, which is a more of a slap in the face than an actual fix to the anguish they caused us.

Travis Spaeth
Papago, Saipan