Hello, I don’t post very often here but I did want to describe a pretty poor experience on a LHR - JFK flight yesterday. To be clear, I’ve been a BAEC Gold for the past 12 years and I generally enjoy flying BA, which I do across the atlantic, in J, on 4 or 5 round trips a year.

This past trip, a flight to Berlin via LHR was a bit of a disaster. The orienting flight from JFK was 2 hours late resulting in a misconnect on the LHR-TXL sector. I’m pretty sure we could have made the connection if the people at the deboarding gate had our names for a tight connection but they said we weren’t on their list. We went thru security and ended up missing the TXL flight by 5 mins. We were rebooked on a later flight. Upon arrival in Berlin we waited and waited for our checked baggage. Alas, it failed to make an appearance. I dealt with the Tegel ground handling agent that BA uses- M Aeroground. Boy oh boy, what a stressful and maddening experience that was. Seriously understaffed, and when it was possible to talk to the ground agents subcontractor in the baggage service center it was a lot of “it’s not our problem” and ”I don’t work for Aeroground”. Long story short, it took 2 days and two trips to the airport to finally get the bags. I spent a total of 8 hours in q’s. Very frustrating. The BA baggage tracking app appears to be in serious need of an upgrade too.

The return flight from Berlin to London went fine. The LHR-JFK was on a 777 and I was in a window seat in row 10. There were a lot of seats available a few hours prior to the flight, including the seat next to mine and the seat across the aisle. Unsurprisingly they were both occupied when the flight took off. I enjoyed dinner and then fell asleep. About 3 hours into the flight I was awoken when someone fell on the divider and ended up landing on my shoulder. He was laughing and saying “sorry sorry”. The guy in the seat next to me was laughing too. It took about 5 seconds to realize these guys were seriously inebriated. I dozed off again and about 10 minutes later was awoken again by them singing and shouting. This went on for quiet a while. I eventually went up to a FA and asked if they could do something. The FA was very nice, told me the CSD was being informed and I noticed a male FA having a word with them both. Alas, none of this helped and they both continued yelping and ‘singing’. It was a really uncomfortable experience. The J cabin was full and a lot of folks looked very bleary eyed and none too happy. And no, after I originally complained to the FA there was no follow up by either the FA’s or CSD. These guys continued to avail themselves of the beer in the club kitchen (and all the Twirls :-( )

All in all, not a great experience on BA. I can’t help but think that it would have been so much better if the BA teams were better equipped to handle delays, baggage issues and drunken twits.