I was chatting to some friends at the weekend who had been to New York in the half term. Naturally, after hearing about their trip, I asked who they flew with; I was not expecting Kuwait Airways to be the answer!

This is surprising for a number of reasons; not least because the flight shouldn’t exist!

Coincidentally, a very good article about this exact flight was published on today on One Mile at a Time, a really fantastic miles and points blog, written by ‘Lucky’ Ben Schlappig. If you have not read his blog before, I strongly urge you to take a look!

I recommend you read Lucky’s post for the background on the ins and outs of the flight first to understand why this was significant.

My friends turned up at Heathrow expecting to fly to New York, but check-in wasn’t open more than three hours before. They waited and waited, but nothing happened, so eventually they went to the ticket desk to see what was up. The man there told them that there was no flight, that it hadn’t operated for months, and that he had personally emailed them to say so.

This, as you can imagine, was not what my friends said had happened, and pressed the man to check. He duly did and realised that they had been omitted from his mailing list. It was approaching the supposed departure time and they were getting anxious. Fortunately for them, the man from Kuwait Airlines arranged for them to be put onto the next British Airways flight out to New York. They said it was a very full flight and lots of people were being bumped up to accommodate them down the back; sadly they were not put straight into the nose of a 747, but after the check-in experience they had, I think that they were just glad to get onto the plane.

So it all worked out ok, and they were put onto a BA flight on the way home; seeing as they had saved a couple of hundred pounds each anyway booking Kuwait over BA, this is a great result!

I would suggest that anyone with a booking on Kuwait Airways LHR – JFK checks their booking again and contacts the airline based on this experience!