When it comes to travellers in an airport being left stranded, luggageless, disoriented, confused, and clueless, I doubt there’s much difference between Europeans and Americans.
I don’t know why you’re so vested in defending BA, but I’ll assure you that I was just as unhappy with United when they stranded me and my ex in O’Hare on our wedding night. I became less unhappy when all the clerks stayed overtime until every passenger was rebooked and told what United was doing about the situation.
Lousy customer service is lousy customer service, and insisting that passengers shouldn’t expect good customer service is just ridiculous.
that’s the rub. they weren’t able to be rebooked, because they were in the middle of a weather system which shut the airport down until 6PM at the earliest today (with an offficial proper reopening tomorrow).
this isn’t one plane getting canceled. this is every freaking plane at heathrow, the largest international airport in the world, getting canceled. you can’t easily rebook these people - and making token promise rebookings (“yes, you’re on the flight tomorrow!”… which later gets canceled) is pointless.
and they don’t know what they’re doing about the situation because they’re not the ones who shut down the whole airport.
what do you think customer service was like on 9/11? US airspace didn’t open until Sept. 13. do you think some lowly clerk at United knew that?
Just a note to the OP: in my time of being a business traveler for 2 decades and more than 1,000 flights in goodness knows how many countries, with the majority of my international flights being to the UK, I have never, ever, even in passing, heard a fellow frequent traveler say anything positive about British Airways except for “they have good tea.” I myself have received some of the poorest service ever from British Air, and given that I only fly Club or First on them, that’s saying something.
I had a transit in LHR en route to Stockholm from Sydney. It was by far the most fucked up airport that I have been in to in my not so vast experience in flying. Even my home airport of Colombo feels majestic compared to this piece of shit airport.
I appreciate that this airport is probably the biggest and the busiest in the world. However from the crazy terminal transfers in buses to the most ridiculous security screenings, it made my resolve firmer to never to go through this airport unless it is absolutely necessary.
What happens to people who don’t have the necessary British visa in a scenario explained by the OP? In my return journey, I was asked for a British visa (which I don’t have) in order to transfer from terminal 5 to 3. I had to ask the British Airways check in staff to talk to their manager in order to convince that I don’t need to have visa to move between terminals and that I wasn’t asked for any in the first leg of the journey.
Maybe the OP should enlist the services of Try2B Comprehensive because BritishAir must be the logistics division of BritishPetroleum. They’ll go postal by proxy.
Much of the luggage was unloaded. However, doing something like putting bags from flights numbered 0 - 200 on carousel 1, and 201 - 400 on carousel 2 was way beyond them. This meant that every person had to look through all five carousels to see if their luggage had been unloaded.
As for your other rubbish. Have you ever been in this kind of situation? I have. What happens when you get to the front is that the service agent finds the next available flight to somewhere you want to go, gives you the information, and then you get to go someplace to sleep. You don’t leave your customers sleeping on the floor until the next morning - and then have half your staff standing around until it is officially time to start work. I’ve never seen anyone yelling at ticket clerks for the snow, and it didn’t happen in Heathrow. But no one ever walked out on me either. My wife and daughter had a flight canceled in Sydney - on United, thank Og, and the people there stayed past quitting time until everyone got rebooked.
The first rule is to communicate. Not leave without a word, and let the cops tell people to leave. And not to expect people waiting for hours on line to leave the terminal - for the convenience of the Heathrow staff, no doubt, to go to the back of the line in the morning. I already mentioned that the Heathrow express had closed.
And not to assume everyone has an internet connection to rebook. Some people don’t travel with laptops and smartphones. You are allowed to travel being Internet illiterate, you know.
The issue, people, isn’t that no one was going anywhere for a while. They all knew that. The issue was British Air not being interested in setting up where people would be going. Sitting in a hotel for a few days with a confirmed, if late, reservation is a far cry from standing in line after line, or dealing with an overloaded phone system.
Do you really think keeping customer service agents from customers makes sense? I can only imagine that you work for some airline that has made screw the customer its business model.
Remember the volcano? This is not the first time this has happened.
I’ve dealt with shut down airports more than once, and it is a mess, but I’ve had the same experience as Frank - company representatives trying to help you improve your attitude considerably.
As I mentioned, Gatwick had everyone and his brother out there plowing the runways. Heathrow, not so much.
I thought I had answered your question - in this situation, where you are supposed to leave the airport but don’t have a visa, you get put into detention. If you come from the proper country (like the US) you are fine.
I wasn’t aware that they’d hassle you changing terminals, though. Great.
Ahha…missed that point about the detention. Is this the normal practice across Europe/US?
Thanks god for airports like Changi/KL where you can curl up and sleep in the airport overnight…yes…even the people from improper countries are allowed to do this.
My cousin was en route to London from Kenya and had to land in Paris where she was kept on the plane for 8 hours before being allowed to disembark. Luckily her mom is a travel agent who was able to get her on a flight back to the States tomorrow, although that flight could end up being canceled too.
I travel as much as you do. I’ve got no issue with BA, and have had some very good flights with them. They’re not the very best (Qatar, Singapore, Etihad) but they’re a mile away from the bad ones (KLM, Alitalia). I’d pick them over the likes of American or Delta everytime.
Flying pretty much sucks whoever you fly with, but that’s more to do with stupid security regulations and quite often your fellow passengers than anything else.
I don’t want to defend BA - but I think that’s the key point. Rebooking one plane or even rebooking all planes from/to destination X =! very different from rebooking when the whole airport = all flights have been shut down and nobody besides St. Peter knows when the weather will allow flying again.
Also, similar to the US Hub System, Europe also has an interconnected system. So the planes that can’t start from London are one part of the problem; the planes that can’t land at London are the other half (at least, that’s what a speaker for Fraport said last night, they miss the planes that would otherwise land from London. Paris, Brüssels and Düsseldorf are mostly down as of last night.)
About the luggage: my guess (not officially stated) is either that the luggage handlers are out doing other jobs (shovelling snow?) or that they would be underfoot if they started unloading. If the snow is falling in big flakes continously, it’s contionus work just to keep the runways etc clear, and de-ice the planes. Luggage handlers driving their luggage carts around might simply be in the way of the snowplows etc.
If your daughter got to a hotel, she was actually lucky - hundreds or thousands of travellers all over Europe had to sleep on camp beds and similar in the airports.
Under the improved European passenger rights protection, if a flight is late/ cancelled for more than x hours, the airline owes refreshment, overnight, a sleeping accomdation plus a certain money amount. It used to be that airlines could claim “act of God” and get out of it, but the last decision by the Euros in Brüssels was “we don’t care why the passenger was delayed, if he’s delayed, he deserves compensation for his inconvenience and food and a bed, too.” Granted, with unusual circumstances, it might simply be not possible for the airlines to get hotel beds for thousands of passengers (not enough there in the first place), but they still owe the money compensation. Your daughter should check into that and claim it later once she’s home. Or maybe file now that she has time enough sitting around…
If the airport doesn’t tell the airline soon enough to notify the passengers, it’s Heathrows, not BAs fault. If Heathrow told early, and BA messed up getting the passengers to hotels and informing them, then it’s BAs fault. And if the tubes stopped running before midnight leaving people stranded, it sounds again like mis-communication between Heathrow and the tubes.
In Frankfurt, for example, Lufthansa cancelled all inter-German and a lot of inter-continental flights, apparently because people can take the ICE train* between Munich, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Hamburg - and to Brüssels, Paris, even Eurostar to London, but not across the Atlantic, so they will need the planes for the big distances once the weather improves.
Which lead to such congestion on the already-full due to holiday travelling trains that the Bahn advised people to travel on a later date if possible. Jokesters - everybody is travelling now to visit their families and relatives because of the holidays!
I think a problem is promise v. delivery: BA advertises and positions themselves (or at least thinks of themselves) as a “Tier 1” airline, when in reality they’re Tier 2 or worse, but at a Tier 1 price.
Not to defend them too much but I know amongst myself and my colleagues (regular transatlantic flyers) BA is the preference over the dismal AA every time.
However, that is probably due to the restrictions we have on bookings and sure enough, the last three times I’ve flown to the US privately I’ve gone Virgin.
So what’s Surly Chatty Cathy’s excuse? And then to have the nerve to be upset when passengers are documenting it?
Sorry, everybody fucks up or has something happen to them beyond their control every so often. It’s how you respond afterwards that forms my opinion of you.
Interestingly, we have just spent the weekend at some friends near Brussels. About 2 miles from Zavantem airport in fact.
It was one of the few airports running fairly normally over the weekend and lots of inbound flights to European destinations were routed there. Many of the people on those flights didn’t have the necessary arrangements to leave the airport and had to be looked after on site.
Apparently, they did the best they could but even so, it was shambolic and not much fun for all concerned. So it isn’t just Heathrow, but as others have said.
Most of Heathrow is a hole and a nightmare to transit.
Thankfully, we only live about 20 minute drive from the channel crossings so we were able to be somewhat masters of our own destiny and I’m very glad that we weren’t flying.
With the possible exception of Etihad, Singapore, Qatar I couldn’t think of any airline particularly better in service. When I then factor in that BA actually pay their staff a reasonable wage, whereas the others really don’t, it’s no surprise that they’re not the cheapest.
For true suck, KLM, Alitalia, Delta, America, Air France…ooh, I could name quite a lot that make BA seem damned good.
