Disgruntled El Al customers stranded abroad find little help in getting back home

For two days in a row, British-Israeli Ester Suissa and her husband, who are stranded in London, schlepped their suitcases to Heathrow Airport, waiting for hours on standby, desperate to get on a repatriation flight to take them home to Israel.

Suissa, 57, and her husband are just two of tens of thousands of angry customers of Israel’s national carrier El Al who had their return flights to Israel canceled and have been scrambling to make their return home for over a week.

The couple from Even Shmuel in southern Israel arrived in London for a friend’s bar mitzvah two days before the country’s airspace was closed on June 13 due to the Iran conflict, and subsequently their return flight tickets, booked for June 16 with flagship carrier El Al, were canceled.

Last Wednesday, Israeli airlines, including El Al, started operating restricted repatriation flights returning thousands of Israelis, mainly from destinations across Europe, such as London.

El Al specifically asked its customers who had their tickets canceled to fill in a registration form and promised they would be prioritized and assigned a flight according to their original date of departure.

“I have been constantly on the phone for hours over the past week, trying every possible channel, but we can’t get through, neither via El Al’s customer service line or via WhatsApp, we can’t speak to anybody to find out about when we can fly home,” Suissa told The Times of Israel.

“The uncertainty is unbearable, so we spent the last two days going to Heathrow Airport to get on a standby queue as we have been hearing that Israelis with a canceled El Al ticket were trying their luck arriving at the airport, hoping for a chance of getting on a flight to Tel Aviv, as not all passengers arrive,” she added.

Suissa described the experience as “humiliating and demeaning.”

“We were queuing up and groups of people with children were pushing and shouting that they had nowhere to stay – it was animal-like and beyond unpleasant, I was in tears,” she said. “We were told by El Al that on Tuesday, there were about 50 standby seats, and about 20 on Wednesday, which we didn’t get.”

Frustrated by getting no response from El Al for days, Israeli-American Sara Haber, 34, from Jerusalem, together with her husband and their one-year-old baby, were among the group of at least 50 stranded Israelis at Heathrow Airport on Wednesday signing up on the standby list to get back on a flight to Tel Aviv that evening. Haber, who visited her sister in London, was booked on an El Al flight to return to Israel together with her family on June 18.

“We are all standing in line, it’s a complete mayhem, and then after waiting for hours, El Al says there is no room on the flight, but some people who didn’t have a flight date were all of a sudden called forward and were put on the flight – it is a shit show,” Haber fumed. “There was one woman who was crying because she maxed out her limit on her credit card, and had nowhere to stay, and another woman was losing it, saying she needed to go back as her son was fighting in Gaza.”

“There is no rhyme or reason: There were people whose El Al flights were canceled on June 17 who got on the flight, and people who had tickets from June 15, and they still haven’t gotten on a flight back home,” Haber recounted.

Haber, an in-house lawyer for a high-tech company, said she and her husband were struggling to work from London and had to take days off.

Israel reopened its skies for commercial air travel on Tuesday night after the Home Front Command lifted all restrictions on gatherings as a ceasefire with Iran appeared to take hold, ending 12 days of fighting. In the preceding week, Israeli airlines operated restricted repatriation flights to bring back an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Israelis stranded abroad home and help those stuck in the country leave.

Following the full resumption of operations at Tel Aviv’s international Ben Gurion Airport, El Al said it would ramp up its flight schedule and add frequencies from major destinations where tens of thousands of Israelis were still stranded, grappling with a financial burden of hotel and other costs piling up each day.

“El Al promised more flights, but there is still only one flight a day from London,” Suissa lamented.

Then on Wednesday, El Al reopened flight ticket sales to the general public for all destinations the airline serves. The announcement caused a lot of uproar as it came just a day after El Al told its stranded customers that it would only open ticket sales to the general public after the assignment of its passengers to repatriation flights is complete.

“I’m just so angry at El Al as they are not taking care of their customers first and instead are making money off this situation when the company made huge profits,” said Haber. “I paid the El Al premium, and now they are treating us as if they are doing us a favor.”

He added: “They are not putting us on a flight because they realized that they could sell their tickets now for even more extortion than what they sold them to me!”

Both Haber and Suissa emphasized that they were prepared to pay a higher price to book El Al tickets instead of cheaper charter or low-cost airline flight tickets, because it was a safer option and they felt they would be in good hands.

Since the outbreak of war with the Hamas terror group on October 7, 2023, many Israelis preferred to book with El Al because of the built-up trust among travelers that the carrier is a safe bet, as it continued to fly during the fighting when foreign carriers stopped servicing Tel Aviv. Surplus demand and a scarce supply of flights have allowed El Al to charge exorbitant airfares during the war period.

“I would honestly never fly El Al again, and would be better off booking a foreign airline,” said Haber.

In response to the wave of disappointed customer complaints, El Al said Thursday that it set up a special operations team to accelerate the return of Israelis home. A team of about 200 company employees will proactively contact El Al passengers stranded abroad to assign them seats on repatriation flights, the airline said, adding that returning Israelis home is its top priority.

“I have a son going back into Gaza next week, who is at home at the moment, and a daughter who’s pregnant with a complicated pregnancy, and we just want to be in Israel,” said Suissa. “We just want to go home.”