We've all had some nightmarish travel experiences, but hopefully nothing like this. Recently, TikTok creator Sara Manifould posted a video sharing her explanation of how a delayed flight she was on apparently resulted in 300 people being stranded for over 50 hours, and each turn in the story is weirder than the next.
"Here's the worst travel story you've ever heard," Sara begins. "How we were ghosted by Egyptair, spent two days in an airport, made 300 new friends on WhatsApp, and how there is no record that it ever happened."
The story starts when Sara and her best friend decided to take a girls' trip to tour Egypt. They showed up to the airport three hours early, sat down for a glass of wine, and the next thing they knew, an employee told them that their flight would be delayed by 12 hours.
The delay meant that their flight should have taken off at 2 a.m. But — "Our flight disappears from the board," Sara says. "It doesn't get moved to 2 a.m." And here's the really weird part: Sara said their flight also disappeared from the Egyptair website.
Sara and her friend decided to spend the delay back at their hotel, but showed up back at the airport in time for their flight. By 2 a.m., she says, "we are wandering the Dulles airport. There's nobody at the check-in counters... At our gate, we meet up with about half of the passengers on our flight. Where's the other half? I don't know!"
The other half of the passengers, she says, "obviously had information that we [did not]," because there was in fact no 2 a.m. flight, as she says she and some other passengers had been told. "There have been no calls, no texts, no emails" from Egyptair at this point, Sara claims, so how were they to know that there was no flight? She and her friend went back to their hotel, and decided to return to the airport at 7 a.m.
The next morning, while socializing with other stranded passengers, Sara said the two joined a WhatsApp group message with other people on their flight. This is when they say they discovered that the first class passengers on the flight had been put up in a hotel by Egyptair, and been given at least some updates — not directly, but via phone calls to the concierge.
According to Sara, the passengers in the airport that morning soon learned that there weren't any Egyptair employees in the airport at all at that time. "Now airport management is getting involved," says Sara.
Finally, says Sara, "an Egyptair employee comes to the airport, and says that we will get another update at midnight. That is 36 hours after we were supposed to take off." I can't even imagine.
Sara says an airline employee informed passengers that she "was going to talk to the engineering crew" and get the passengers an update by 2 p.m. that day. The crew's update? Sara says that they had no update, and didn't know when they'd be able to get one.
After this, the airline purportedly acquiesced and began to unload people's bags. But, even after seven hours, Sara says her bag was not among the 15 that they managed to get off the plane.
On day two, Sara said that she and her friend left the airport around midnight, and were approached by another woman who asked if they were on the Egyptair flight. "I [recognized] her, she's on the flight [as well]," Sara says. That's when the woman informed them that apparently, they would be taking off at noon the next day. Sara's like, "Where did you get this information, ma'am?!"
Get this — Sara says that the woman told them she's an employee for Frontier, that she's able to access flight path information on the computer, and that a flight path for their flight has appeared for the next day at noon.
Since the woman who claimed to work at Frontier didn't have WhatsApp, Sara was purportedly the one to alert the group chat that they were, apparently, scheduled to take off the next day at noon. "Did we ever get an email, call, text, anything from Egyptair?" Sara asks. "Absolutely not."
When Sara and her friend got to the airport the next day, they were met with the blessing of an Egyptair check-in desk. "How they knew we were gonna show up, I do not know," says Sara.
However, "We check in, we get our boarding pass, we go down the stairs to TSA," says Sara, "and we see all of the people who have checked in before us waiting to get through security, and everyone is screaming at each other."
"Egyptair printed the wrong date on our boarding pass," she says. "It was backdated, two days ago." And of course, TSA was purportedly telling passengers, "'You cannot enter security with a boarding pass from two days ago.'"
TSA and Egyptair employees apparently "[fought] it out," and each boarding pass for that flight was purportedly marked with a star, allowing passengers to get through.
FINALLY, Sara said that the passengers got on the plane — and the flight was supposedly delayed a further two hours, making for a total delay of 50 hours. But at last, Sara says, they take off.
"You'd think that's where the story ends," Sara says in her video, "but you would be wrong. The entire time we're in the airport, we're getting updates like this: 'Welcome, you have arrived!' We had not taken off at this point. Even third party tracking apps are saying that we have landed."
Sara says this screenshot was taken while passengers were still in Washington, DC.
BuzzFeed reached out to Egyptair for comment. We’ll update you when they respond.
"Now, everyone is filing for reimbursement through traveler's insurance, for hotels, food, etc," explains Sara, "and some people didn't even take the flight, so they're just requesting a refund."
However, Sara said the problem with attempting to utilize traveler's insurance was that there was no record of a delay, or that any of this took place. "Our boarding passes are backdated," says Sara. "We never got anything via email, the flight disappeared from the website, everything that we learned was through a random WhatsApp chat that was created, or through a hotel concierge. Or a random Frontier employee. So, nobody can get any money back."
"But, I will say there was one positive thing to come out of this trip — all of my new WhatsApp friends," she says.
The story has at least a bit of a happy ending. Sara told BuzzFeed that when she and her friend landed in Egypt, everybody they met was extremely nice. Though they were two days late, their tour group actually waited for the two of them to catch up, so they could still make their tour (and wouldn't be stranded yet again). "I had to pay this taxi $200 in cash to get me there," Sara told BuzzFeed, "but he got us to our tour group."
Since they were two days late getting to Cairo, Sara said the two missed out on seeing the pyramids. "Which like — why even go to Egypt?!" Sara jokes. They were pretty bummed, but when they returned to Cairo, they found out that their travel company had set them up with a private tour of the pyramids. Which is very, very cool.
