Waiting for Aeroflot

Unkindness to fellow travellers

 Memorandum

To:

• MR. PULAT, Ministry of [Soviet] Civil Aviation
• MR. ARDYMOV, Transit Manager
• INTOURIST

From:


M.A. HALL, PASSENGER ON SU Z44 HELD IN TRANSIT SINCE 12/7/81

Date: 19/7/81

Subject: TREATMENT OF AEROFLOT TRANSIT PASSENGERS

              (TO BE READ WITH ATTACHED MEMO. OF 16/7/81)

Tonight, one full week after arriving at Moscow airport too late to catch a confirmed onward flight to Mogadishu, myself and six other passengers are finally die to be released from Sheremetyovo transit hotel to fly to our destination.

The missed connection was no fault of our own. Nothing was achieved in finding us an alternative flight within a reasonable time.

I regret to say that in the following three days since I sent my memorandum of the 16/7/81, I can record no improvement in the treatment of transit passengers, except some improvement s in the quality and variety - not the service - of meals.

Everything I wrote in the previous memo still applies. Here are some more examples, over the past three days of the attitudes and system operating in the modern airport and hotel of one of the worlds greatest capitals:

Mr Ardymov and his staff made no attempt to inform us of the outcome of his efforts to reroute us to Mogadishu via Frankfurt on Friday (yesterday). So on Friday morning two of us decided to investigate progress.

As we walked through the front doorway, the doorman shouted at us, and roughly ordered us not to go beyond the hotel steps. This was intolerable treatment of any guest, let alone people held for a week. Obviously he acted on orders.

Another passenger also being held for a week acquired a visa through his embassy. He was told yesterday at the hotel reception desk that this was "not a visa", and the clerk threatened to call the immigration police as he walked to the airport terminal.

A team from Zimbabwe were in transit after taking part in an International Junior Cycling championships in GDR. Before leaving Leipzig, knowing they would have to stop over in Moscow, they asked Aeroflot officials to organise short term visas. The Aeroflot official assured them this would be done on their arrival.

But when they arrived at Sheremetyevo they were subjected to the usual lengthy passport screening, and refused visas without explanation.

They became three day hostages!

[Here Dad, the editor, starts breaking all his own rules and a unleashes a flood of exclamation marks - a punctiation mark which he regarded as histrionic and unseemly.]

My (shared) room has not been cleaned once in a week. After five days we handed in our two small towels and asked for fresh ones. One hour later we asked again and were curtly told "Tomorrow, tomorrow." Thirty six hours later, still no towels.

Two cleaning women on Thursday came shouting into a crowded lobby, accusing two departing passengers of taking towels.  An argument followed and, and the two women joined the departing passengers to continue the altercation on the bus!

Within four days four transit passengers told me of the following losses:

1. A knife from a rucksack at the airport.
2. Nine roubles in the hotel.
3. A watch in the hotel.
4. A man's white embroidered jacket in the hotel.

The hotel is heavily staffed but the attitude and the system seem to be controlling rather than serving, helping or communicating with the guests. There are many signs of this, the meals system being the most blatent. Resources are so rationed out and so rigidly measured that guests have suffered delays and inconvenience, in rooms and dining hall.

The latest trick is to divert "all without visas and passports" to some (often locked) room on the 8th floor if they have any enquiry. This is not hotel keeping. It is Kafka!

In my week here I have had a reasonably proper, friendly hearing just three times. Once from Mr Pulat and twice from the ladies at the airport transit desk. One young lady was particularly helpful, and effective, in meeting one minor requirement. And she did not break any rules to be so.

From the memorandum of 16/7/81

[......]

Some of us are amazed that there is not more concern that there is not more concern among the Soviet authorities at the stain on the countrys reputation which is inevitably spread wide and deep around the world by such treatment. Even those of us who come here with nothing but goodwill towards the Soviet Union and its people are angry and somewhat embittered by our experience.

These are our specific complaints:

1. Despite a two hour delay in the Heathrow airport departure lounge, no Aeroflot representative came to explain the technical problem to passengers, not to collect and transmit information about the onward bookings from Moscow.

2.   After arriving at Moscow late at night, more than four hours delayed, we, as transit passengers with confirmed onward bookings, were kept hanging about for at least one hour while our passports were subjected to unnecessarily close scrutiny by immigration police, who behaved to some passport holders as if they might be trying to smuggle themselves into the Soviet Union on false passports, not transit passengers unwittingly delayed here!

3. We were herded into the hotel lobby to be addressed very curtly by a tired receptionist whose first words were to the effect that she was tired and didn't want any trouble, and that we must share rooms by twos.

4. The nest day a rough handwritten list of new departure flights was put on the reception desk, for Singapore, Lusaka, Mogadishu and Dar-es Salaam. All these turned out to be wrong, except for a few Singapore passengers and a few Dar es Salaam passengers.

Mogadishu passengers were told five minutes before bus departure that they weren't going. Some of the Dar es Salaam group were taken off the plane... Information is not conveyed to all rooms. Passengers are expected to "hover" and keep their ears and eyes open at all times. Yet, some passengers were shouted at, when sitting in the lobby, not to smoke and ordered to "go to your floor, these are seats for departing passengers." !!Only those of us who have protested or insisted have received anything like an apology on any matter.

On one occasion we were told to write down our complainst and the people responsible "would be punished" Punishment is not the issue. Who should punish whom? Is it the fault of the tired old lady at the end of a long shift or is it the fault of the Aeroflot organisation?

THE HOTEL

[You have to remember that Dad's father was an excellent hotel manager in South Africa.]

6. The really low standard of meal service, the lack of ordinary services and facilities like tea, coffee and fresh water; the attempted bureaucracy and regimentation of "Guests" which is so rigid it must inevatibly break down into inefficiency and confusion - all these things would be understandable in some youth camp or neglected provincial hotel. But I repeat, we are talking of a modern hotel by the new airport of a great capital.

This is becoming your "window" for thousands ordinary westerners and Third World people, more than your conferences. This is really doing criminal damage to your reputation!

Some examples:

• Meal service is appalingly slow. We have to elbow our way to get vouchers for every meal. Then we can wait up to one hour for service, and very long waits between meals.
• There are no between meals refreshment, even if we wish to pay, which should not always be necessary. In the heat we need a reaqdy refreshment service.
• There is no leisure facility of any kind. Not a single chess set or table tennis. Nobody has even thought of how to keep the transit hostages diverted!
• On the second day some of us had no soap or toilet paper. We had to plead and demand, until a small bar of soap and a small pile of shabby squares were handed over, on written application!! We are now running out again.

For the sake of your own reputation, you should now take immediate action on all these points.

Tony Hall