Vienna Skye spent nearly $4,000 on one-way tickets so she and her mother could fly back home to the United States
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Vienna Skye and her mother spent four days at Rio de Janeiro airport when their United Airlines flight back to the US was continually delayed.
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En route to Brazil, the mother-daughter duo endured a nightmarish layover in Houston that saw them sleeping alongside other delayed passengers in airport beds.
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When their original flight was canceled, they spent $4,000 on a one-way ticket to New York.
After traveling to Brazil to attend a wedding, Vienna Skye and her mother had an unexpected reprieve in South America. They didn’t spend their long stay exploring or sightseeing, but after four days of flight delays, the mother-daughter duo got to know Rio de Janeiro airport in depth.
Skye, 25, detailed her experience “living at the airport” in an Instagram Reel that reached 3.5 million viewers on the app. She showed images of her and her mother, Donna, on their fourth day passing through the terminal as they waited for United Airlines to finally clear their flight back to Newark, New Jersey.
“I didn’t sleep because United Airlines continually canceled my flight for four days in a row. So I just got stuck at the Rio de Janeiro airport with absolutely no place to sleep,” Skye began in a voiceover.
The New York-based model and content creator tells PEOPLE that they arrived at the airport on a Sunday afternoon. She and Donna only arrived in the US the following Thursday, around 1am EST.
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As Skye explained in her viral video, the prolonged drive home was made even more frustrating by a series of resulting inconveniences. She and other travelers boarded and disembarked the same aircraft multiple times during the multi-day delay, and they had to leave the airport each time they were removed from the aircraft, meaning Skye had to retrieve her checked luggage three separate times. .
She and her mother also went through Brazilian customs six times when, normally, they would only have gone through twice – once when entering and once when leaving the country.
Skye told People that United put them up in a hotel for their first extra night in Rio since their flight was originally canceled and rescheduled for the next morning. Over the next few days, however, it became difficult to find times and places to rest because United continually delayed the flight, which meant mother and daughter had to stand by and wait for updates at the airport.
“Ultimately, there was no explanation,” says the Instagram star. “They kept saying maintenance.”
Skye also claims that the plane’s crew was not very sympathetic to the plight of their passengers, but she understands that they were trapped in the same difficult circumstances.
“There was an elderly person with his wife or daughter, I’m not sure, who needed medication, and [the flight attendants] we weren’t being supportive at all,” says the social media star. “My mom also has thyroid issues and didn’t have enough medication, because one or two days, yeah, you should pack that. But four days is a lot.”
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