Originally Posted by
irmster
Flew back from GIB yesterday after a short Christmas break with my mother. Leaving aside the appalling food in CE on the way back, we had yet another issue with wheelchair assistance.
My mother is 81 and on a waiting list for a hip replacement with trouble walking, so I had booked assistance level one - so from the pier to customs. Except we ended up on a remote gate at T3 so I had assumed the assistance would be where the bus dropped us off. There was a sign for assistance but no one was there. There was even a phone for assistance, but no one answered. In the end, I had to help my mother on a pretty long walk (2 lifts, several corridors) - through the border, baggage collection and to T3 short term car park. Another lady also had the same issue and had to be helped by her family. Anyone on their own would just have been stuck.
By the time she arrived she was in tears and today cannot get out of bed as her hip is so sore.
This isn't the first time this has happened with BA. Unacceptable.
Sorry to hear your mother is in pain
I had pre-booked assistance (option 2) at T5 last night and it was not ideal. The crew were great and very kindly waited 30 mins with me for the wheelchair to arrive but it was completely unacceptable from omniserve. Apparently they have a general shortage of staff and recruitment issues but their organizational abilities also seem poor - they sent someone from a gates to pick up at c gates even though there were assistance staff at c gates doing nothing. The delay caused the cabin crew an extra 30 minutes work as they were on their last flight of the day, the captain a delay to get to his next flight at a gates as he needed to wait for the wheelchair to close up the plane, an extra 30 minutes use of the air bridge, the tug driver a delay to take the plane to its next stop of maintenance and so on... Other than the omniserve shambles it was a good flight with an amazingly kind crew.
On the assistance options, if your mother needs to use this service again I would book option 2. When I first needed to use assistance I went for option 1 as I thought the description of option 2 was overkill but any time I had option 1 booked the BA check in staff would strongly encourage me to change it to option 2 as, I paraphrase, option 1 was useless.