I'm in Las Vegas this week at the Server Side Java Symposium. Having a software coference in Vegas has the obvious attractions, although I've never found gambling to be terribly appealing since I never seem to win. I'm guessing there's around 550-600 people at the event, all of whom seme to be hard-core enterprise application people. I did part of the Sun keynote yesterday demonstrating some cool technologies around the good old (sorry, new) Sun SPOTs.

Getting to Las Vegas was actually one of the worst travel experiences I've had in a long time.

I was on the direct Virgin flight from London Gatwick to Las Vegas. Security was the usual nightmare (I'd forgotten that a lot of charter flights leave from Gatwick making this seriously hard work), but I'd arrived in plenty of time to account for this. The flight was scheduled to leave at 10.45. At 10.30 the waiting area at the gate was absolutely packed (the flight was full with nearly 400 people on it), but nobody had been allowed on the plane. I was waiting outside when an an annoucement was made that the next update regarding departure would be made at 11. Apparently there was some technical problem with the plane. Back to the departure lounge. At 11 I was told the next update would be at 12 (obviously a recursive update algorithm). At 12 I was told a change of plane was required and departure would be 1530. Inconvenient, but still not too bad I thought. Refreshment vouchers were provided and the Priority Pass lounge provided power, comfy seats and free drinks to get some work done. At 3pm the departure time changed to 1630 due to air traffic control delaying the transfer of our new plane from Heathrow. Finally just before 4pm the call was made to go back to the gate. Up to this point everything appeared to have been done to resolve an unavoidable problem. However, this is where things really went wrong.

I joined the lengthy queue of people at the gate and waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually after about 20 minutes of no movement an announcement was made that, in order to board, a new passenger manifest was required to check everyone off. This would be arriving shortly. After another 5 minutes we were told the manifest was being printed. Sadly all they had was a dot matrix printer so after another 10 minutes we were told they'd only printed out up to the letter H. People with names starting A through H could board, the rest would... wait. Chaos ensued as the A through Hs made their way to the front around the lesser I through Zs. After another interminable wait the queue cleared; each passenger had to be checked on the list to see if their seat number had changed due to the different configuration, plus searches, etc, etc. No announcement was made that the rest of us could board but eventually we all did. I'd been lucky enough to get an exit row seat and was told that should still be available as I boarded. I did think this was a rather odd way to put it, since I was going to my seat; ould I find someone already there? What would happen if I did? I took my thankfully vacant seat and was just settling in when someone from Virgin came up to me and said I was in the wrong seat. I showed her my boarding pass, pointed to the seat number and said that I was pretty certain I was in the right seat. "No, this is free seating and I need these seats for a group of people". My response, since I was pretty fed up by now, was, "Well, if this is free seating then surely I'm free to sit here". As you'd expect this didn't win me any points and I was told I was being moved. Would I still get a window seat as requested or would I be in the middle of a row? I was told I had a very nice aisle seat and was lead across the plane, all the way to the back of the plane, back across to the same side I'd been on and then all the way back up the plane to be put in the row right behind where I'd been sitting! I thanked the nice lady from Virgin for my tour of the back of the plane which got chuckles from my fellow passengers and a particularly withering look from the attendant. I really, really had to bite my toungue not to tell her what I really thought. It wasn't over yet though; 60 people had been voluntarily bumped off the plane due to there being less seats and, despite the excrutiating (and it would seem pointless) seat check, the crew couldn't make the list match the number of passengers. All 60 bumped passenger names were read out asking if anyone on the list was present to make themselves known. The flight finally left at 1840, just under eight hours late. In all my travels the only airline to produce a longer delay was Aeroflot. I was simply stunned by the incompetent handling of this situation. After all, it's not like this is a situation that's never happened before and it's not like the ground staff didn't have time to organise the necessary paperwork in advance. I look forward to hearing what Virgin's customer services department have to say about this based in the lengthy essay I wrote on the complaint form during the flight.

Viva Las Vegas!