With the Wheelchair Basketball Association (NBB) to Tenerife
For years, we at goMICE have been organising the travel for the NBB, the Dutch Basketball Federation. We have been doing this for about 5 years. Last November, we were told that both the men and the women would be taking part in the European Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Tenerife. The request was whether we would look into the options for a comfortable flight and arrange this for them. Naturally, we set to work on this with great pleasure!
Booking a complicated flight
Inside This blog, about our goMICE Consultant Rosa, you can read how she managed to get wooden costumes weighing 300 kilograms onto an aeroplane! We also recently transported a orchestra to Vienna. So we are quite used to a bit of complexity and a challenge.
Booking flights for the Wheelchair Basketball Association is also fairly complicated. A lot is involved. We arrange not only the flights for the players, but also extra baggage. Think of all the bags, massage tables, and of course all the wheelchairs have to be transported as well. And besides their daily wheelchair, they also bring sports wheelchairs. Per team, they have a total of around 22 wheelchairs with them!
The flights to Tenerife
It soon transpired that the aircraft that normally operate those flights to Tenerife did not have the required capacity to transport all the wheelchairs. Herein lay a considerable challenge.
Transporting the entire wheelchair basketball association to Tenerife
As always, we will go above and beyond and make sure it gets sorted one way or another. Following intensive contact with the airlines, we have persuaded them to deploy a larger aircraft on this flight, making it possible to transport all the wheelchairs after all.
The European Championships in Tenerife
Last week, both teams left for Tenerife. To achieve cost savings for the client, the women's team departed from Brussels and the men's team from Amsterdam.
On the morning of departure, the goMICE team was present at Schiphol to provide assistance, wave the gentlemen off and wish them the best of luck. Naturally, we are following the performance of both teams closely. At the time of writing, both teams have already played a match. The ladies won their first match, while the gentlemen unfortunately lost.
With their motto, ‘To battle is in our nature‘, I expect everything to go brilliantly during the tournament. In any case, we wish both teams the best of luck during the European Championship.
Will you also in the future have group flights needed, with or without special requests? Please feel free to get in touch via Hello@goMICE.nl so that we can arrange this for you without any worries.