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Old Dec 31, 2016, 3:03 am
  #14  
r00ty
 
Join Date: Dec 2014
Programs: BAEC (although I might just cut up the card)
Posts: 338
I think, putting aside the compensation business. Yesterday for many was one frustration after another. I was in the baggage hall when the announcement regarding times was made (at 00:15, delays of 1-2am for some flights and 2-3am for others). Our flight number wasn't mentioned so I tried to hunt down the baggage people to find out what that meant for us. Anyway, as a side story there were many angry people.

Now, I can recount my story and it was one (mostly unavoidable) tragedy after another.

First of course the delays. Now I say unavoidable, but we really run LHR so close to capacity that anything out of the ordinary creates so many cancellations it's not really "out of the ordinary" any more. Not sure what can be done about that though. Business is business and no-one owning an airport will want to run it at 70% capacity "to be safe" so. OK. We deal with the delay. Certainly for a change we can't blame BA.

Finally with varying degrees of delay (6 hours for me) we got away generally without any problems. Only to arrive some 3 hours later at terminal C. Minor annoyance we all get from time to time. My thinking was that with the lower capacity, surely they would have cleared up the A gates. But, then we found out why. Since the fog cleared some they cleared just about every waiting flight to go.

Meaning quite a busy queue for the border, which to be fair moved so much faster than it did in the era of 3 e-gates that switched off at 10pm (or so), but a quite strange snaking queue going to parts of the area I'd never visited, it was a very interesting tour that lasted some 20minutes. As I say, for the sheer number of people it was fast moving, and proof the e-gates are a good thing.

Finally, I thought. Surely, after the wait for the train, the walking and the waiting, the bag would be ready.

Alas, no. They were struggling too, presumably no-one had considered the possibility that the fog might clear (despite all the airlines counting on it, apparently). When we arrived allegedly (overheard from a very hounded manager there) they had just "finished" with the departures and were currently working on arrival belts 1-6.

To me, it was just another annoying thing after a really really long day.

So, I understand the frustrations of the OP (if not the automatic move to compensation). Yesterday was a very <expletive deleted> day.

What was only made clear, if you hunted down a manager was that if you didn't want to wait, you could go online to BA and elect to have your bag delivered to you. But, you'd only find this out if you went hunting for one of these elusive (well they were all hanging around the business/first baggage queues) managers.

Just my penny's worth.
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