Being delayed 24 hours while traveling

When I was a little girl I remember an airplane being held for someone who was running late but that seems to have fallen out of vogue these days. Airlines do not hold planes till passengers are boarded. In fact they seem happy to sell your ticket if you merely run a tad late. Many flights are overbooked by two or three seats to prevent waste and it seems airlines almost plan to force two or three to miss a connection.

In our experience airlines will send you on the first leg of your trip even though they know there is no way you will catch your second leg, due to bad weather conditions or other issues. It seems to be their policy to enjoy putting people through the rigmarole of rescheduling.

In December 2014, we missed a connecting flight by a few minutes and saw our plane depart.

If we had magically been able to relax at that point for 22 hours, it would have been one thing. But you're expected to manage your kids in queues for two hours. One set of people deal with re-booking flights, another with hotels. Meanwhile your kids get hungry and frustrated.

You wait so long in queues that by the time you get to see anyone you are just desperate to get somewhere you can eat and rest. This forces you to make split second decisions that are sometimes bad ideas.

For example we agreed to take two separate rooms because they had no family rooms available. They weren't even next to each other. We couldn't remember which room was which so ended up banging on the wrong door a few times.

If I were doing it over again, I would

• ask for food vouchers first thing and send my spouse and kids to get something to eat
• wait with the children in the queues so people can see how upset the children are getting and maybe bump us up in the line - rather than leaving them to meltdown in Baggage Reclaim
• insist on a family room or at least getting next door rooms with an adjoining door
• get double sets of keys, one for each spouse
• write everything down
• ask for longer layovers - an hour per kid is my rule with an upward limit of 3 hours and no less than 45 minutes to prevent missing flights
• report the incident later - you might get a voucher from the airline for your next trip!

It was such a strange environment that the boys did not sleep or eat well and so were not themselves.

We had been stranded in Amsterdam, which was in the wrong direction from where we needed to go and which is an hour off in the wrong direction as well.

This meant that by the time we got to our final destination, the boys slept a couple hours and were up at 3:45 am!

On the upside we reported it to the airline and got vouchers to mostly pay for a trip the following year.