baldfatchris

My wife and I recently flew BA First from London to Mexico City. Overall it was a thoroughly disappointing experience. Here's a breakdown:
The arrival experience at Heathrow is great - the first class check-in area is very pleasant and you have a dedicated route through security and straight into the lounge.

The Concorde Lounge is great, and would be wonderful if it weren't for the really loud people occupying it. This is less to do with acoustics and more to do with a widespread sense of entitlement. However, my wife and I had a pleasant breakfast before making our way to the gate, This is where the experience started to go downhill.

It was red nose day and many of the staff at the gate were wearing red nose headbands and being generally jolly.
My wife an I boarded together, and as we were in the muddle seats my wife was shown to her seat on the left of the plane. I was told to cross the galley and take the right aisle. This would have been fine except the galley was blocked by a steward rearranging the contents of a trolley. without looking up he pointed down the aisle and told me to head down the plane. I investigated this option, but there was nowhere in the next cabin to cross, so I came back and waited for him to finish. Again without looking up, and rather irritably, he told me that I would have to go that way or there would be no food service. I tried to explain but he wasn't interested. Finally, a stewardess from the first class cabin reappeared and took me through the left aisle up to the front galley and showed me to my seat.

The seat area is pleasant, in a rather masculine sort of way. The seat is comfortable and there are lots of cubby holes to stow things. The area feels spacious, but not as big as the Emirates First Class Suite.
One thing that was immediately obvious was that the seat was rather grubby. The area where the seat joined the partition was full of small crumbs - presumably left over from the previous occupant's breakfast. When the stewardess came through with a hot towel I used it to wipe down the armrests. The towel came out black, much to the stewardess's embarrassment. She didn't offer to do anything about it.

Then the real fun began. A lively discussion developed in the front galley, apparently about the availability or not of the Caesar Salad. The pitch rose from animated to angry, with much crashing of cabinets. An one point someone was asked to provide their staff number, a request that clearly wasn't going to be entertained.
A fellow passenger in the first class cabin started joking about this altercation. We weren't entirely sure that it wasn't a red-nose day prank to benefit Comic Relief.
If one of the service objectives of First Class is to offer a peaceful and stress-free travel experience, this was probably the worst way to kick this off.
Finally, the ground crew were off-loaded, the bickering subsided and we were ready to go.

Once we were in the air, it was time to settle back and relax. The first step in this is to recline the seat. Now as aircraft seats offer more options, the controls become necessarily more complex. The controls on my seat had passed from complex to impenetrable. This wasn't helped by the fact that the labels to the various buttons had been rubbed off, presumably by enthusiastic cleaning in the distant past. I tried a few buttons at random but couldn't make any sense of them. As a seasoned traveler and digitally aware traveler, I was surprised to hit a wall so early so I persevered - to no effect. Finally, I called the stewardess, expecting a humiliating lesson in obvious control. Happily for my personal pride, the stewardess was equally flummoxed. This was reassuring but not very helpful. But she knew a guy who could help. She disappeared briefly and came back with a steward from a different cabin. He had been on a course. He explained that the circular dial - which in any normal control would dial clockwise or anticlockwise, also slid to the left and right - in defiance of all normal UX patterns. Here's a tip to designers of future complex ccontrolsystems - can it be used after the control panel has been enthusiastically scoured with an abrasive pad?

Having finally reclined the seat I then turned my attention to the entertainment system. The TV screen was a good size and a decent quality. The selection of movies and tv shows was pretty good. What dragged the experience down was the really terrible remote that you have to use to navigate the system. The remote itself feels really of fashioned, with clunky controls and an annoying lag. Where it became really frustrating was trying to watch a tv boxed set. Clearly, the concept of box sets didn't occur to the team who designed the user interface, and it has been akwardly bolted on as an afterthought, and with no testing. The result is that you can watch the first episode of a series pretty easily, but watching subsequent episodes takes requires a sleuth-like attitude and a certain abount of luck. I finaly worked out that if you ignore the usual navigation and use the - very clunky - search feature, you can eventually find the further episodes of your selected series.

The food service on my flght was pretty good, with enough choice of food very generous serving of drinks. I tend not to eat too much on planes so I can't comment much further.

It was then time to get some sleep, and this was where the experience went from comically incompetent to frankly awful. One of the promises of the first class experience is that you can travel in a bubble of peace and relaxation, and get a good night's sleep at 30,000 feet. This was not the case here.
The beds themselves are comfy enough, and the cabin temperature wasn't oppressively hot - so all seemed well. What killed any chance of sleep was the noise from the galley. Throughout the while flight there seemed to be building work going on up front, with endless crashing and banging, loud discussions amongst the crew, and on two occasions what sounded like trays of crockery being dropped from a great height. (The second time this happened I actually went to investigate. What had actually happened was that a loaded tray of crockery had in fact been dropped from a great height.)
In exasperation, I called the stweardess and asked her to keep the noise down. She apologised, but explained that the layout of the galley and the mechanics of the stowage spaces meant that silence was not an option.

So, in summary, the experience wasn't great. It wasn't even good. At best I would call it mediocre.
I should point out that I am a frequent Emirates flyer, and my benchmark is Emirates First Class which, if not perfect, sets the benchmark pretty high. On this scale, BA First Class is about equivalent to Emirates Business Class on a poor day. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has ever flown Emirates Business Class or above.