I recently waited for two days to get out of a foreign city due to flight cancellations. I almost got fired from my job because my manager thought I could have tried harder to get back to the United States.

Tell us about the longest time you were standed in another country due to a flight delay or cancellation. Also, did your boss believe you when you finally came back to work?

My longest delay was about 20 hours. This happened on an outbound flight to Hong Kong. Because it was on the outbound it didn't cause me to miss work, but it still sucked because I missed a day in Hong Kong. That's a lot worse than missing work IMHO.

3 and a half days when in Vegas trying to get home to NY. There was a major snowstorm that dumped 2 and a half feet of snow on NY, and I was 'stuck' in Vegas. What a shame!

My longest flight delay was 24 hours trying to depart Harbin, China about 12 years ago. We waited in a freezing, unheated airport all day for the inbound plane to arrive. They kept telling us it was delayed and to stay and wait until they finally announced that the flight was cancelled. I don't think it was weather related but rather there weren't enough passengers booked. Our total compensation was a small carton of juice midway through the day! Anyway we got up early the next morning and headed back to the airport to try again, this time successfully. I didn't miss any work because I was headed to Beijing to continue the rest of my trip.

Travdis, please forgive me for straying from the subject, but I have a question for Patty. Patty, did you see that display of ice sculptures in Harbin? I have seen pics and that's something I really want to do someday.

Now back on the subject. That does sound awful, to be stranded in an unheated airport. I hope you enjoyed the heck out of that juice!!

One day late returning from a Mexican holiday. My boss definitely believed me as it was caused by a huge snow storm preventing flights from leaving or returning to SeaTac.

About 30 hours stuck in Paris due to American airlines' defective planes and bad decisions or lack of other planes to substitute.

Of course my boss believed me, I wouldn't work for anyone who thought I was a liar or would fire me for problems like that. I think I called him from Paris to say I'd be a day late, I know I tried.

I think it was about 28 hours when I was supposed to be leaving Milan to return home after my stint in school in Florence. As I was on an educational leave of absence from my job, I was not late in returning to work. The flight that was supposed to come from America to pick us up had been cancelled because it wasn't full enough (at least that's what we passengers guessed), so they waited for the flight the next day. We were put up in a hotel and fed and actually things took a very festive and convivial turn as we swapped stories of our time in Italy, why we were there and how we spent it. If I'm ever delayed that much again, I hope it's as pleasant!

BC

This was in Sydney, Aus, in 1971, and we were flying out to Perth early in the afternoon.

Unfortunately, during take-off we took with us the tail assembly of a plane taxiing across our path (of course it shouldn't have been there - sackings of air controllers resulted later) causing indeterminate damage to our underside.

We flew out to sea to discharge most of our fuel and then circled over the airport for an hour while they tried to assess the consequences from the ground.

Finally we got the order to land, which the pilots achieved to perfection, despite a hole in the undercarriage that you could drive a car into.

All this resulted in a 24 hour delay, during which we were lodged and fed at the airlines expense.

Harzer

I was supposed to take this trip 5 years ago. Lost my job, so my flight got delayed. Hopefully next year... so it will be a 6-year delay

P_M,
Yes we were there for the ice festival which I enjoyed very much. The ice sculptures are huge and you can walk/climb on top of many of them (hard to do without slipping though). I rode horseback on the frozen Songhua Jiang which was such a treat. I have very fond memories of Harbin, just not of the airport Like I said that was 12 years ago so I'm sure the facilities are much improved. I've never experienced any place quite so cold before or since!

My longest has been an overnight delay (several times), but I once had friends visiting me who were delayed three days due to the passing of Hurricane Lenny.

The hurricane passed before their departure date, but the hub island was so busy trying to get it's own stranded passengers out that they wouldn't allow any other inter-island passengers to come thru. Although they had a lot of schedule rearranging to do via overseas calls, they laughed it off and didn't really mind in the long run. It only extended their vacation and now they try to plan their trips here during hurricane season.

OK folks, there you have it, Faina wins the prize for the longest delay. Faina, I hope your 5-year delay ends soon.

Thanks for the info on Harbin, Patty.

Now that I think about it, I suppose my delay on the Hong Kong trip wasn't too bad. Once we learned the flight wouldn't be going out until the next morning, my grandmother and I rented a car and spent the afternoon driving around Seattle, the home of my Fodorite pal Suze. It was my first time in that city and I must admit I enjoyed visiting Seattle.

My most recent delay was on my trip to Switzerland in August. Long story short, my plane from Houston took off for London, and the left engine caught fire on take-off. This caused me to arrive into Geneva about 8 hours later than planned, so I missed my first day. If you ever have an experience like this, it really puts things in perspective and the delay seems really unimportant. If you'd like to read the full story, here it is:

http://www.fodors.com/forums/pgMessa...creen_name=P_M

Two days, back in 1970 when 10,000 people were stranded at Heathrow by a humungous snowstorm. We were on a charter flight, and the company put us up at a nice hotel in London and gave us a meal allowance. How about that!

This may have already been discussed on Fodors, but this thread made me wonder if any fodorite was on a plane incoming to the USA on 9/11 and ended up diverted to Canada. If so, what were you told on the planes before you landed and how did you cope with being "stranded" for several days? I was actually between flights on 9/11, having flown into Las Vegas on 9/8 and return flight was scheduled for 9/20. For awhile there I thought I would have to drive my rental car back home (a 2000 mile jaunt), but regularly scheduled flights began again around 9/15 or so.

I remember a thread started on 09/11 by a scared young woman who was in NY at the time the planes hit the towers, and people posted to keep her company, and later she posted after getting home. Have goosbums now just thinking about it!

One week delay.
Sept 12, 2001. Stayed in the UK.

About 3 days. We had flown to Canada for a wedding and upon our arrival Air Canada promptly went on strike. We spent many hours trying to book alternate flights home and took the earliest one we could find. We made the most of our delay by renting a car and driving to see Niagra Falls and some of the surrounding countryside.

The only downside to all of this was my husband had just started a new job and had been warned not to take off any extra time. Luckily, his boss believed our story.

Mine was years ago and about 45 hours total. Went to the Florence airport only to find out that the fog was too bad for flights to take off. Alitalia personnel, who were stationed directly across from a newspaper kiosk with those large hanging newspaper headlines screaming that there was a train strike in Italy that day, vigorously recommended I take a train voucher from them to get to Pisa, from whence I could get a flight to Rome. When I pointed to the kiosk and noted that there was a train strike, major silence, then huge conversation among the Alitalia personnel and after about 10 minutes the announcement that they'd put us on a bus to Pisa.
So, off we go to Pisa. In Pisa, we are told we have to fly to Rome. We wait a few hours and catch a flight to Rome. In Rome we wait a few hours and are told we have to fly to London.
In London, we line up at the Alitalia counter and after an hour or two are told we can'tf ly direct to DC but will be going to NYC instead. After another few hours we board and fly to NYC, about a 5-hour flight. By now I've lost all sense of time - have been traveling for about 36 hours.
In NYC we are put on a 16-seater something or other and are dropped off in DC National Airport at about 4 in the morning. I didn't even think planes could land there at that time of day, but we did. In all it was about a 45-hour experience. I don't care to repeat it.

My longest "flight delay" was because my Skopje to Zurich flight was cancelled when NATO started bombing Serbia in March 1999. The airspace was closed so I ended up on the train to Thessaloniki where I hopscotched via Vienna to Zurich. I spent the night near the Zurich airport and then caught the Zurich to Chicago flight a day later!