Air France leaves passenger with dead parent stranded in Paris

With the tone of this whole post, I'd love to imagine that the writer was himself an Air France gate agent. I don't think customer service would be his forte.

Early this year, we flew Lufthansa from Delhi (India) and were stranded at the Munich airport. None of us got the transit visas, no food, they switched off the air-conditioning in the night, no blankets - just plain sheets when it was snowing outside. Lufthansa flew knowing there was no connecting flight left at Munich to not loose the booking. Adding insult to injury, they lost most of our baggage. On return flight, despite confirmed veg meal bookings - none of us got it on a flight lasting 12 hours. You know the best part, we were 70+ people on a corporate booking.

Its the same everywhere in Europe - may be it's their culture.

That said, I fully support asking for your rights (in court, if needed) and publicly calling them out for bad service -- the latter is the one thing after their profit statement that will get the company interested in improving everyone's experience by going the extra mile.

It's interesting- before we were married, my wife visited Paris, and someone in her party tried to have two croissants, instead of one, for breakfast at their hotel and was rather rudely told "only one!". It could be a convention in France, that one is strictly required to stick to the menu. For people from the third world (South Africa in our case) the inflexibility of First-World rules sometimes comes as a bit of a shock.

But some schedules are tight, and there may not have been a free aircraft that day