Flying home in a Covid lockdown

Our experience of being abroad in March 2020 when Covid-19 hit. Continued from here.

A view of Corralejo town on our first day. We never got a chance to return.

Throughout our week in limbo as the hotel closed down around us, we got to know some of the other guests. Several had been moved into our hotel from elsewhere in the resort, as accommodation across the island began to shut down. Travellers with flights booked for Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol were put on flights to Gatwick. Couples and families who didn't have airport transfers sorted had to book one taxi per person - such were the rules in lockdown Spain, as taxis were not allowed to carry more than one passenger each.

After a long week holed up in a hotel room waiting and worrying, checking the notice boards multiple times a day for updates, we left on Saturday 21 March, on our original flight, but even that didn't go without several hitches. 

With so many guests now on flights that day, and Spain's rules changed so that the first few rows of coaches were out of bounds to keep the driver safe, TUI had failed to provide enough coaches to transfer everyone to the airport. A Hunger Games-style scramble for seats took place before we'd even left the hotel. When we did finally pull out of those gates, a cheer went up, a coachful of passengers jubilant at escaping their palm-lined prison.

Arriving at the airport, we were confronted with the most chaotic check-in situation I've ever seen. With so many people being bumped from now-cancelled flights to other destinations in the UK, the whole process was understandably taking far longer than normal. Looking back now, it's absolutely mad that we were standing in a heaving crowd for more than an hour, with no social distancing, in a country that was in one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe at the time.

Airside in the airport, things were far from normal. Several of the cafes, restaurants and shops in the terminal were closed at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, and signs everywhere warned travellers to keep a 2m distance from airport staff. Anyone who overstepped the 2m mark was embarrassed into retreating by a customer service supervisor armed with a megaphone and a tirade in Spanish. We later found out that the airport itself was closing down that night - we were literally on the last plane off of the island, with other UK-bound flights and a couple of German destinations the only others on the departure board.

As a result of the check-in chaos, all UK flights were a couple of hours late boarding. At this point, the atmosphere teetered between relief of getting out of there, and fear that our flight may still be cancelled, and we'd be stuck on an island where literally everything was closing that night. A couple from Wales, originally due to fly into Bristol, told us their son-in-law was having to drive all the way from Swansea to Gatwick to meet them due to their flight being changed.

Hours later than planned, we were seated on the plane, doors secured for departure, ready to taxi to the runway... when it was announced that a passenger had been taken ill at the back of the plane, and that he, his family and their luggage was being removed. The process took over an hour, during which time the cabin staff began chatting to passengers, telling us that it was their last flight for the foreseeable future, and they'd been advised by their employer to apply for a job in Tesco in the meantime. To this day, we don't know whether the unwell passenger was a Covid case or an unrelated illness, but he was transferred into an ambulance waiting on the runway. I do wonder what happened to his family, removed from the last flight and left on an island where all accommodation was closed.

Finally, we took off, and the mood on board was a jovial one, awash with relief at the thought of getting back to home soil. We were heading for Gatwick, with passengers originally booked for other airports including Manchester being provided with coaches to complete their journey. Around quarter to midnight, shortly before we were due to land in Gatwick, the pilot came on the tannoy and announced that Gatwick were refusing us permission to land as they didn't have the ground staff (in hindsight, they had probably already furloughed or made redundant many staff by this point) so we were heading to Stansted. I remember holding my breath as the announcement finished, expecting people to riot at the news of another disruption to an already extremely delayed journey. Instead, the whole plane burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation, a mood once again buoyed by the relief that we were almost home.

Almost... but not quite. We were braced to go through some sort of medical screening at Stansted. Would we have our temperatures taken? Be questioned on where we'd been or who we'd been with? How long would we be told to isolate? In reality, in the early hours of that Sunday morning, we were waved through security with barely a glance at our passports, and not even handed a leaflet about Covid. We couldn't believe it. This was less than 48 hours before Boris Johnson made his first TV address, putting us into our first lockdown (I've talked more about this before). A year on, and things have barely changed regarding Covid border controls.