Monique Devereux, former chief reporter at the Herald and now Christchurch correspondent for Radio New Zealand, is at the Cricket World Cup. She brings nzherald.co.nz regular news and views from the West Indies
Note to wealthy businesspeople with penchant for aviation; if you set up an airline in the Caribbean that regularly runs on time and doesn't change destination mid flight, you'll make a mint.
We've now had our last (hopefully) experience with Liat, the Caribbean airline.
I'm not sure what
Liat is supposed to stand for but the variations include Leave Islands Any Time, Luggage In Another Territory, Look Its Another Timezone… the list goes on.
So you'll be getting the gist that this is not the most reliable airline.
Today we were expecting a pretty standard journey, Grenada to Barbados in 30 minutes. Silly us!
Despite reconfirming my seat yesterday, I didn't exist on anypassenger list anywhere this morning. Only my partner was travelling, they said.
"Just put her on," the frazzled Liat check in man eventually said to the frazzled Liat check in woman after a very long, very circular conversation about the disparities between my clearly marked ticket and the non-existence of me on any list.
There was no plane anyway. Just chaos.
Two plane loads of people for two scheduled flights to Barbados leaving 20 minutes apart. One, late, plane.
As it turned out if your ticket said "Liat Flight 1864", you were on your way to sunny Barbados.
If it said "Liat Flight 864" the only place you were going was back to your hard, plastic airline terminal seat.
864 was the placebo flight. 1864 was the real deal. We were missing that crucial digit "1" on our boarding pass.
Hours later another plane finally arrived. Oh how the people cheered!
After a mad dash to claim a seat (it's lucky dip on every flight here and last one on is often straight back off, seatless) the flight attendant welcomed us on board and added that the flight wasn't actually going to Barbados now.
"A short trip to St Lucia first."
The logic of this being that many of the people going to Barbados were trying to meet a connecting flight to St Lucia.
The Liat pilot made an executive decision and took out the middle man.
So off we went, and finally arrived in Barbados much much later on.
But that's the last of Liat for us.
Tomorrow its Air Jamaica to see a semi final victory. We hope.
