An Edinburgh family have been travelling for nearly four days after getting caught up in a series of travel chaos as they tried to get home from Sydney.
Finally heading out to Australia for his sister's wedding that had been postponed due to the pandemic, Ben Newbon, 36, his wife and their two young children had spent two weeks there before trying to return to Scotland.
Scheduled to stop in both Singapore and Amsterdam, the family had been told before they "even left Sydney" that their Singapore connection was delayed, meaning they would miss the following flight.
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Automatically rebooked onto a new connection, they had hoped the chaos would end there, however huge queues and a lack of information in Amsterdam meant they were quickly stranded in the Netherlands.
Speaking to Edinburgh Live, Ben explained they should have arrived back home on Sunday morning (April 24), but will now hopefully return on Tuesday afternoon, adding an extra two days onto their journey time.
Travelling with an 11-month-old baby and a three-year-old toddler, Ben described the experience as "super stressful", stating:
"Before we had even left Sydney we got told that our flight from Singapore was delayed by three hours so that we would miss our connecting flight to Amsterdam.
"But then we got a message to say as we would miss our flight we had been booked on a different KLM one that would give us two hours between the flights. Usually that would be fine but we were travelling with an 11 month old baby and a three-year-old, so once we had managed to get off the plane, get the buggy, get everyone to the toilet and change nappies we came out and no one was there to help us on where to go.
"Amsterdam airport is huge and confusing, there wasn't any signs and we actually ended up leaving the airport instead of going to the transfers area, at this point we'd already been travelling for over 24 hours.
"We then had to join an enormous queue to get back into the building, which we could tell was going to be over two hours long. of course we missed out flight and then got told we had to join another huge two hour queue to get rebooked."
Now desperately trying to get back to Edinburgh, the rebooking queue closed two hours into their wait, with the family told to find somewhere to stay in Amsterdam.
Severely exhausted and jet-lagged, Ben explained they were able to stay with family, but have now needed to book the ferry to Newcastle, as well as a final train back up the east coast to Edinburgh.
He added: "We stood in that queue for ages and then that queue closed and we got told we would need to find somewhere else to stay for the night and would get reimbursed. Luckily my brother, who we were in Sydney, with has a house in Amsterdam and we were able to go there and get some sleep. We were incredibly lucky as there were so many people in that queue who wouldn't have that option.
"I've done a lot of travelling in my younger years before I had my family and I've never experienced anything like this before. You see images of things like this on the news but you never think it's going to happen to you.
"I had originally booked to go back to work on Wednesday so will now have to go straight into it, as we didn't think it would be this super stressful."
With similar scenes of chaotic airports appearing all over the UK and the rest of the world as international travel returns, Ben said they had received no real assistance or help, despite travelling with young children.
He said: "The kids hadn't slept for most of the flight either, and of course we had a lot of hand baggage as you do and my three-year-old had been crying and then eventually fell asleep on the bags, so we had to carry them through this queue as well as all our bags.
"I think the worst thing is that there was really no staff who could help us, we tried to explain we had the baby and a toddler and was there a way we could be prioritised but they just said we were in the same boat as everyone else. Other passengers were amazing though and helped us move all of our stuff along the queue, but the lack of help was horrendous.
"There were no flights available until Tuesday when we were first in the queue, so we have had to book the ferry to Newcastle out of our own pocket and then get the train back up to Edinburgh."
Have you experienced any similar travel chaos trying to get out of or back to Edinburgh? If you'd like to share your experience, you can get in touch with Edinburgh Live on twitter, Facebook and at news@edinburghlive.co.uk
