My parents who are both in their 70s, were travelling on BA last Saturday from LUX-LHR-BHD (Luxembourg, London Heathrow, Belfast City) in CE for the incoming leg and domestic on to BHD. The flights were miles tickets on my account.
They have never flown up front before but as there was a long lay over in LHR and they are getting frail, it was worth the handful of miles.
I had warned them in advance (thanks to the posts on here) that sometimes the lounge staff at LHR don't always fully understand the rules permitting entry, especially on incoming CE flights, so luckily they were tenacious.
Firstly, on arrival into T1 from LUX, they went to the International lounge (of course, the wrong lounge) where they were simply told by the attendant "No, your not allowed in here", loudly and in front of other passengers. They questioned this, say, "our son assured us we would be allowed in the lounge" to be told again brusquely, "no, you are not allowed in here". They were very embarrassed by this and left the lounge.
I think this is not a suitable way to talk to any passenger.
Undeterred, my Mum (good on her!) went to the Customer Services desk where a very helpful assistant checked their tickets and boarding passes and confirmed that they were allowed in the Domestic Lounge as they had arrived on CE. On presenting themselves at the Domestic lounge, the attendant looked at their boarding passes and said no, they would only be allowed in if they were members of the Executive Club.
Eventually they went back to the Cust. Svs desk, found the girl they had spoken to and asked her to call the lounge to inform the guy there that they should indeed be admitted.
When they finally walked back, they were admitted, but without a word of "i'm sorry, I misunderstood or anything from the attendant".
Thumbs up for the CS agent who, apparently, said to my folks that "this happens all the time" and apologised to them. She also said that she put a note/complaint in the system. I will also complain to BA - apart from anything else, the amount of unnecessary walking they ended up doing was a lot, but BA staff should offer the correct service for which they charged.
This issue seems to be reported on this forum again and again. I hope everyone who has the same experience also sends the complaint to BA, but so far BA don't seems to be correcting what seems to be a simple training issue.
In the end, their flight back for BHD was delayed for 3 hours, diverted to BFS (Aldergrove airport) where there was another hiatus, as it took some time for ground transport to be arranged to get them to BFS. They were happy indeed for the lounge access during their long lay over, but happier still to finally get home at 2.30 a.m.