Bad weather strands hundreds of Haikou-bound passengers at Sanya Airport
In the evening of March 13th, passengers from 5 different flights for Haikou were told their plane was forced to land in Sanya airport instead of Haikou due to heavy fog.
"Before landing in Sanya, we were told that the airline company will arrange our accommodation. However, after hours-long wait for the arrangement, we didn’t see anybody trying to pick us up for accommodation,” said Mr. Duan, one of the passengers stranded at the airport.
According to a spokesman for the Hainan Airline Company, they were trying to contact Sanya hotels for the stranded passengers. However, the situation was so accidental, and all the hotels in Sanya had been fully booked. Thus they were trying to negotiate with passengers.
"It was complete chaos. People didn’t know what was going on and were so angry that they lifted the seats to block the check-in counters”, said one of the passengers, Mr. Wang, angrily.
More than 500 to 600 stranded passengers were involved in the incident to show their complaint for such unreasonable treatment.
The incident even disrupted other normal flights early morning that day.
After a series of negotiation, the airline companies have apologized and decided to compensate RMB150 for each passenger. At present, all the stranded passengers have left and boarding is back to normal.