Why My Flight Home From New York Was Far More Stressful Than It Needed to Be

*This is a collaborative post on my travel from New York but all words and thoughts are my own

Over the early May bank holiday I headed to New York on a little solo trip. The trip was incredible, but by the time bank holiday Monday rolled around I was ready to come home. I missed Scarlett, I missed Luke and I’d done what I wanted to on the trip.

I’d planned a Monday evening flight from New York around 8.30pm which was due to land in London on Tuesday morning around 9am. This way I got to make the most out of my last day in New York, but also got a full day when I got home, win-win.

But things didn’t quite go to plan.

My stressful travel experience

Everything was going well to begin with, we boarded and sat in our seats. Then the time passed that we were meant to take off and we got an update saying there may be an issue with the plane. When the jetty was being removed from the plane after boarding it clipped the engine, eek. So they had to call the police (for notification) and then have engineers come and look at the plane to see if it was safe to fly.

The regular updates over the next hour were ‘we have no update’. But eventually we were told the engineers had deemed the plane unsafe to fly so the flight had been cancelled. We were told to disembark off the plane, head back to the airport and they’d let us know the next steps.

Obviously if the plane was unsafe that’s the best scenario, but the next ten hours were stressful.

What it meant for getting home

We were told that we’d all be re-booked onto new flights, but due to the time they’d all be the following morning. British Airways would automatically reach out with new flights that you could accept or deny for alternatives.

To give them their due I got a new flight option within about 45 minutes. But it was for 7.50am the following morning, but that flight was JFK, and I was at Newark.

Worrying about my luggage

The next worry after getting a new flight was where my luggage was. It took so long to get the bags off the plane that I genuinely thought mine might have been misplaced. Especially scary because I also checked in my hand luggage suitcase. Annoyingly I didn’t have any GPS trackers in my bags like the EASY Finder 4G, but more on that in a bit.

The next ten hours

They offered hotels, but only at Newark. And I didn’t want to sleep knowing that I then needed to get to the opposite side of New York. So after making friends with two other solo travellers we got an uber over to JFK so we knew were there. By this point it was about 11pm and there were no hotels around we could check into. So the airport floor it was. I managed about an hour of broken sleep, but that’s it. And to make matters worse there was no shops or cafes or anything to buy a drink. So from about 8pm until we could check in at 5am there was nothing.

That bagel when I got through security genuinely tasted like the best thing I’d ever eaten.

How I could have made my luggage situation less stressful

One thing that would have given me so much more peace of mind during my journey home from New York is the EASY Finder 4G GPS Tracker from PAJ GPS. When you’re travelling, one of the biggest worries is not knowing where your luggage is if things go wrong. Whether your bag gets delayed, misses a connection or ends up at a different airport, the uncertainty can be incredibly frustrating. Thankfully this has yet to happen to me, but when I went on a press trip to Aruba the girl who I was travelling with was without her suitcase for the first two days of our trip.

The finder allows you to track your belongings in real time through the Finder Portal app and works in more than 100 countries. So it’s ideal for overseas travel. It stores location history and can send notifications if your luggage moves when you’re not expecting it to, so there’s an extra layer of reassurance.

During my travel home some of my anxiety came from not knowing where my suitcase was. And it happens every time I land and go to pick up my bag, will it be there?!  If I’d been able to check an app and see that my luggage was safely at the airport or on its way to me, it would have saved hours of worrying and wondering.

Do you ever worry you’ve lost your bag?