A Coruña; Thursday, 20 June, 2024

As the flight had crept earlier into the evening that I’d originally booked I’d had to book a day use hotel room and work out of that during the day, finishing work just after 5 and then heading over to the airport to check-in.

When I’d originally booked the trip all the flights had been at different times, but over a couple of weeks more than 9 months ago each flight time had changed, some by considerable amounts which at one point had me spending barely 24 hours in A Coruña. The booking had been changed so many times that at one point BA gave up on making alterations and completely reissued the tickets, though given some of the flights were on Iberia this had only ended up causing even more problems as I was unable to checkin online through either the BA or Iberia apps, so was reliant on airport checkin, and on a less than ideal amount of time.

It took the lady on the Iberia checkin desk at T5 a bit of prodding at her computer, but eventually she was able to find the booking correctly and link everything together and issue me with my boarding pass both for the flight to Madrid tonight and the early morning flight tomorrow onto A Coruña, meaning I could have a bit longer in bed as I could just go straight through security on arrival back at the airport.

With that all sorted I headed through to departures and an uneventful trip through the airport, over to the C gates, onto my flight and over to Madrid.

Landing in Madrid a little after 10pm and to only two officers on passport control for non-EU passports, meant it took nearly 40 minutes to get through the airport and over to the taxi rank to grab a cab round to my hotel for the night.

I’d gone straight to the taxi rank as the hotels website clearly stated they didn’t have a shuttle bus service so a taxi was the only way to get there, so imagine my surprise after I was dropped off at the hotel and the first thing I see on reception desk is a sign about booking your shuttle transfer to the airport or back for just €5, quite a bit less than the €23 I’d just forked out.

There was more confusion at the hotel reception as this too had been booked through BA and in the process of reissuing the tickets it looked like British Airways Holidays had rebooked the hotel room but not cancelled the first booking so the receptionist did wonder why a single person wanted two rooms. Thankfully both rooms had been pre-paid so clearly BA was feeling generous with it’s credit card and I wasn’t on the hook for any additional charges.

After grabbing some water from reception, and reserving my seat on the 05:30 shuttle, I headed up to my room and went straight to bed, having set my alarm for 04:45.