Well, nowadays a trip from Moscow to Kyiv is rather challenging itself, but AirBaltic managed to turned it to a horrible journey. Let me just say that trip with four year old kid and infant took us 40 hours and you could imagine yourself how bad was experience.
It all started in Sheremetyevo Airport. They failed to provide us a plane in time and we took off with one hour delay. With a connection of one hour and a quarter I had a bad feeling and tried to reach company hotline using the phone number from official web site. But it didn’t work! So I addressed the issue to company representative near the Gate. She told me that both flights (Moscow-Riga and Riga-Kyiv) are operated by the same company and many people from this flight is going to Kyiv so we had nothing to worry about – next flight will wait.
Of course she lied! Every person in this company is trying to lie you!! You should never believe them and better not to flight with them!!!
When we reached Riga a company representative was waiting for us. She told that we missed the connection and everyone who don’t have schengen visa should wait for the next flight for 36 hours or we had an option to flight via London the next day. We checked their words and realised that there were available tickets in two hours for direct flight in business class. But company does not care about passengers with kids. They refused us to provide this tickets. Next best option was a direct flight in 24 hours, but it was also too expensive for them. So they gave us tickets via London and vouchers for 60 dollars.
It turned out that transit zone in Riga airport is an abandoned place with only cafe. And there were only overpriced sandwiches, bad coffee and stall pastries. So we were waiting in this horrible place for entire day and night with two kids with no hotel and no good food.
But it was not the end. In the morning we went to gate and it turned out that most people who flew with us had expired COVID-19 tests and they were provided with tickets to this direct flight they were told us had been overbooked. I tried to reach company representative through phone, but she refused not just to speak with me and explain why I should go to London with two exhausted kids, but also to tell me her name.
On top of that whan we took our seats on board it turned out that plane is broken. So they departed us from the cabin and we were waiting extra two hours while technicians were working on it. As a result from 4 hours connection in London we had only hour and a half. And for enormously big Gatwick airport it is not enough. So we were forced to run on connection.
I can tell you that I never saw such a bad service in my life as AirBaltic provides to their customers. And of course I would never flight with them again.