Mr Enigma

Finnair first, just come back from Shanghai after two weeks of meetings. We decided to take a flight with Finnair as we could pool the mailes into our BA accounts and the fare was good.

Must say that the experoence was excellent, on time, good food, good wine and a great attentive crew.

We flew on the ex Virgin A340 with the J2000 seats and found the seat to be comfortable, but the IFE poor, bad films and programming.

However the risks of running one plane for one route became obvious on the return, in the first week of flights the a/c had lost 5 hours and hence we had a 5 hour delay.

Now Finnair excelled themselves, upon check in we were told of the delay and that Finnair had taken the liberty to rebook us with BA (in J) straight through to LHR and apologised for the hassle caused. I must say that we both thought that this was excellent service and later realised that they had rebooked all the J pax with connecting flights in HEL so that they all got to their destinations that day.

So we are going Finnair again in Oct as the whole experience was excellent.

Now I have a question, will I get the miles from Finnair or BA? I was booked in J class and had my exec club details added to the booking and these details were evident on my BP. Any advice or will the miles simply appear in my account.

Now onto the strange upgrade. A couple arrived in J and immediately started to speak to a FA saying that ground staff had said that as F was empty they could be upgraded to F. Of course they were not upgraded at the gate so they were speaking to an FA in quite harsh tones as to why they had not been upgraded after ground said it was ok.

Eventually a member of ground staff arrived to speak to them and explain why they could not be upgraded, something to do with no food being loaded for them (they did say that they would accept J food), this seemed to annoy them further.

Eventually along came the CSD who again explained the situation he then had to attend to another matte. The couple then started to have another go at the FA, demanding that the captain had the final say... then along came the CSD telling them that they were being moved to 1EF!!!

The CSD then spoke to my boss and apologised if we had been disturbed and he looked really annoyed by the whole situation, he said that they would have an interesting flight and that the F crew knew of the incident.

This seemed really strange to me that one could simply berate a member of crew into giving an upgrade. I guess they could have offered to pay for the Upgrade or that they were on honeymoon etc... just seemed a weird situation!!!!

More Champagne Sir?

I agree that sounds odd, but somehow I don't think they'll have actually had that a pleasant experience if the CSD forecasted their experience to you and your boss as "interesting". I'll bet they were number one candidates for, as Blackadder's Baldrick might say, 'sugar' in their tea.