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A Tin Award is given to TAM, the Brazilian airline that I was unfortunate enough to be booked on during my recent trip to the vineyards and wineries of Vale dos Vinhedos, in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul.
Delays were the norm for all flights, from one to three+ hours. We were originally booked on direct flights from JFK to São Paulo, and São Paulo to Porto Alegre. At the airport desk, the São Paulo/Porto Alegre direct flights were changed, both ways, to one-stop flights. The excuse was that the original flight was going to be 45 minutes late - what was not revealed was that the stopover would cost us at least an additional hour or more. I was told by an English-speaking Brazilian, that because the locals do not like to fly that one-stop flight since a direct flight exists, the airline re-routs all foreigners to maximize the space they can sell on the direct flights.
The departure gate personnel for the return flight in São Paulo considered passengers an inconvenience to be barely tolerated, because we were stopping them from socializing, talking on their cell phones etc. When a passenger complained that all the announcements were in Portuguese without English follow-up, the response was “If you want to be in Brazil, you’d better learn Portuguese!”.
And talking about gates… on the return trip, the gate printed on the boarding pass was 10; when we finally arrived in São Paulo one-hour late and went to gate 10 looking for the New York flight, we were told that the gate was changed to 9; we went to 9 and had to wait for 45 minutes, standing, before we were told that the New York flight would depart from gate 11; we rushed to gate 11 and had to stand for another 45 minutes before we exited via gate 11 and were then rerouted through a back corridor to gate 9, where the plane had been sitting all this time!
The food was atrocious. The meals from JFK’s kitchens have been always close to inedible. It is a given. But, when starting from a foreign airport, the food is mostly pretty good. In this case, the food was worse than the JFK food!
For these and many other reasons, TAM gets the Tin Award.
By all means go to Brazil, it’s a wonderful country. But use another airline to get there.
© April 2008 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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