justonething

Ah, we checked in at Toronto for our BA flight to Heathrow then Manchester in plenty of time. I’m a a bit anal about things like checking in…

The very pleasant BA lady at the desk (unusual in itself) said “you’ll be into Terminal 4 and out of the new Terminal 5, here’s a piece of paper that tells you about the transfer.” Cool, I thought - supposed to be super smooth getting through there and the building is jolly nice, by all accounts. So, in a sad kind of way, we were looking forward to it.

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of BA. TBH, I thought they were a bit sh!t before they lost one of our bags into Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. I thought they were more sh!t after giving us a credit card to get some cash for incidentals whilst we waited for our bag - the card didn’t work. I thought they were really sh!t when it took them 3 days to get the bag to us.

It could have been worse…the guy in front of us at Vancouver Airport was heading to Whistler for a week. They’d lost all his bags…skis, cold weather gear - the lot. Imagine the joy of being in a ski resort with none of your gear. I mean, how hard is it to put your bags on the same plane that you are travelling on?

Apparently very difficult.

So, we landed at Heathrow and I switched on the iPhone to check the news on the BBC. “Chaos at T5″ was the headline (or somesuch)…which brought a resounding ‘hmmm’ from yours truly. Now we were into T4 (well, I say T4 - but it could have been anywhere as the plane was parked on the tarmac and we were bussed to the terminal).

From there, we went up the stairs, down some stairs and into a queue for flight connections, onto a bus for the 18 minute (count ‘em) transfer to T5 (other airports spend some of their £4bn on whizzy trains) with a load of stinky long haul passengers and then up an escalator.

“oooh, T5 looks nice” I thought as we careered into another queue. This one was to get through a door (remember “super smooth transfer”, the next one was for the boarding pass check (we bypassed the 400 strong line at the customer services desk and the 400 strong line at passport control for non-UK transfers). At the boarding pass check a kind lady was telling people that their flights had been cancelled…nice of her. “No, I’m sorry I don’t know when the next one will leave, please join that queue” (the 400 strong one).

The next line was for passport control. Smile for the photograph. I asked the lady what was going on about 20 feet to my right where about 200 people were stood at the bottom of an escalator. “Oh the security screening is at the top of that escalator and there are too many people up there, so they are having to manage the queue” (remember super smooth transfer). Great.

To be fair that queue moved fairly quickly. After about 10 minutes we were up and into the security screening queue. Shoes, belt, coat, jumper all came off…into the fully automated screening x-ray thingy. Very good, but I feel that the flow may not work so well when it is super busy…you’ll see what I mean when you go through.

At last we were through and into the terminal proper. It’s full of high end shops - Harrods, Mulberry etc attempting to wring the last of your pounds into their coffers…and to be fair again, is very, very nice.

At the gate the staff didn’t seem to know how to work the screens or escalators to take you to the plane as they were letting people through then holding them at the top of the escalator for a few minutes. There were no updates as to when we were boarding and when we did it was just a free for all. Ho hum.

We sat on the plane for 40 minutes whilst they loaded on the cargo and struggled to close the doors. Hmm. How ironic. Struggling to get the cargo on. Maybe they are waiting for the bags to come over from here, there and everywhere.

The flight was punctuated by the tale of the lady sat next to Jackie. She’d got to T5 at 3:30 the previous day, had her flight cancelled, shovelled into a crappy hotel told to come back at 5amonly to be told that her flight was cancelled and then herded onto our flight. She was only in the north west for a couple of days.

Imagine how she’ll feel without her bags. Yep, no bags…no bags for anyone on that plane (well bar about 10 people), which we were kindly informed of when we got to the carousel.

And we still have no bags. Three days later. BA don’t seem to know what is happening to them.

I guess at the end of this, my previous resolution should have been stuck to. “Don’t fly through Heathrow”. I’ve now added “don’t fly BA. EVER.”

BA are simply terrible. Their flight crews are rude and cranky, their staff on the ground, whilst pleasant are poorly trained and lack customer service skills and their bagage handlers/systems clearly rubbish. And not just at T5. I know someone who works at Manchester Airport and they regularly have ‘hundreds of bags a week’ stacked up there that are misplaced. When I called to check on my bag yesterday the guy on the phone just outright lied to me and said that both flights bringing our bag up had been cancelled. He looked a bit foolish when I told him I’d checked the flight status online. Come on, don’t lie to me. You’ll get caught.

I don’t know what has gone wrong at T5. Other than crass incompetence, finger pointing, lack of training, poor testing, poor communication, poor preparation and a distinct absence of management listening skills. BA went for the glory - the big bang of moving almost all their services to T5 in one go. Big bang? Big mistake. A schoolboy error.

All in all, it’s not that big a deal I suppose. No-one has died and a few bags are late to their destination - at least on the face of it. The repercussions of this for each individual involved are unknown and unreported, so the true cost of BA’s incompetence will likely never be known. For us it is a late bag. For others cancelled holidays, missed meetings, perhaps missed time spent with family. Who knows?

It should never have been like this. I do wonder if BA knew that they were flying into a storm and just thought they’d brazen it out. They must have done…after three years planning for the change over it was probably way too late to change their plans. I also wonder if the could have used the regional airport network more effectively than just piling everyone into a bad situation at Heathrow. I don’t know.

But I do know that I will never fly through Heathrow again and I’ll never fly BA again. If I do, please shoot me.

-pc.