I went to a wedding in Portugal.

Last year I flew to Portugal to attend a wedding in Leiria.

We flew through Lisbon. I was pretty stressed during that time because our business was exploding. I left the Airport with an open laptop in my hands, searching for our SIXT car representative who was supposed to wait for us.

She was nowhere to be found. When she finally arrived 20 minutes late, we had to wait again with her until a minibus arrived that brought us to some off-site near the airport.
 

There was an absurdly long queue. After a while, we decided to just abandon the wait and took an Uber to our hotel, losing €300 on the SIXT booking. We decided to book another rental service online for our drive to Leiria. A friend recommended Guerin.

Leiria is about 3 hours from Lisbon. When we returned to the airport to get our new rental car the next day, Guerin gave us a 5-year-old electric vehicle. It wasn't fully charged! 

Our hotel in Leiria was supposed to have a charging outlet, so we weren't immediately concerned. However, halfway to our destination, the battery was draining faster than expected.

We stopped at a larger gas station on the highway but couldn't use any of the 20 charging stations they had there. You needed some kind of special card or a subscription to the local charging apps. We downloaded and signed up for two advertised apps I had never heard of, but still, neither could connect us to electricity.

A helpful elderly Portuguese man with a Tesla stopped to assist us. He didn’t speak any English, but luckily my friend spoke some Portuguese. We managed to get about 30% charge before that man wanted to continue his journey.

With the new charge, we finally made it to the Leiria hotel, where we found a single small wall box (Luckily it wasn’t occupied already).

We plugged in the car and oh boy…

When we wanted to leave half an hour later to attend the first wedding location near the beach, the charging cable wouldn't disconnect. The car seemed stuck in some broken mode that prevented cable removal!

After several customer support calls, Guerin somehow arranged for a tow truck. While waiting for hours we got so frustrated that my friend eventually smashed various random buttons on the car's screen. Suddenly the car shut off. We could remove the cable.
The tow truck arrived at that exact moment.

We finally arrived at the wedding several hours late.
The night of the wedding, we barely slept because there was a small heavy metal concert in the town’s center that blasted loud music until 3 am for a few people.

We eventually made it back to Lisbon with the car nearly empty again.

A day later for departure, we arrived at the Airport 3 hours before our flight.

That day, the queue for the security check was so long that when you got onto the automatic escalator at the bottom you almost fell over the people waiting in the queue at the top. In that entire security control queue, there were no flight information screens, and the security staff that was standing next to the lines didn’t want to give any kind of help to the hundreds of confused people waiting there.

When we finally left the security check, we saw on the flight screen that the boarding was closing. Surprised, we sprinted to the gate, only to be told by the lady that “She had just sent the bus away and couldn’t let us in”.

We had missed our flight.

Funnily enough, a friend who was on that exact bus wrote me 10 minutes later: “Where are you? The bus is still standing here”.  

I finally snapped. 

I told the airport personnel that if they couldn't get me on a same-day flight home, I would "go on a rampage” and I meant it (remember: I had urgent business matters to solve during the whole trip).

While I don’t think the staff I spoke to understood what I meant by “rampage”, we were eventually connected with a helpful TAP Air Business Support representative who got us flights to Brussels, which was 3 hours from our final destination. It cost me 2000€. 

I will never go back to Lisbon again.