BNA to LHR CW review
Hello everyone, I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season. I recently flew British Airways Club World from Nashville to London and wanted to give a review of how the flight went for me.
Lounge - Being an executive club member or having a club world ticket gets you access to British Airways sister airline lounge in Nashville. The Admirals Lounge is run by American Air and I found it profoundly under whelming. Entering the lounge you take an elevator to the second floor, where there is a large seating area and bar room. I immediately noticed the floor was covered in crumbs of all sorts, and the lounge was actually pretty packed. It did not feel like an intimate experience at all. The complimentary food available was a tray of stale cookies and a package of something else that I cant remember. The bathrooms were also pretty dirty. I went over to the bar tender to chat for a bit. She was super nice, but led me to believe that because all the British Airways flights leave pretty late, it results in a influx of people coming to the lounge during the last shift when no one is working. Any-who, I think next time I will just head to my departure gate.
Seat - I had seat 7K, which I was told is probably the best Club World seat on a 788 or 789 because of the privacy it offers. I personally did not like it at all. I am a pretty tall guy, about 6'4, so it was difficult sliding in and out of the seat due to the over head bin storage. I also had one hell of a time getting the bed flat, stool down, bedding onto the seat, then crawling into it. I think next time I will pick an aisle seat just to make life a bit easier for maneuvering.
Failed FLUB Attempt - Many people warned me that this was going to happen, but I tried anyways. The flight from BNA to LHR is typically a 788 flight, which has no first class cabin. For whatever reason, the rotation landed a 789 plan at nashville that day, so we had an entire first class cabin open for us to choose seats from at check in. I chose a first class cabin seat, locked it in, and then was promptly bumped back to a random seat (which just so happen to be 7k) in club world. It just kinda makes me upset that this is standard practice for them to do this. Why open those seats at all? What if I had paid the $122 in advance to reserve my seat several months out, then saw this opening to go to FC, but was then bumped back to a random seat? Just seems like a bad business practice.
Food and Service - Our flight appeared to a pretty light load, so a lot of the cabin crew in CW only had to manage like 10 of us. For the price of the plane ticket I was not very pleased with the actual service. The dinner was to be an appetizer soup and salad, a main course of fish, and a dessert. One attendant brought me out a salad, another a main course, then they forgot to bring out my dessert (I had to flag one down). I never received my soup at all (which is the primary portion I was looking forward to). But hey, it was almost Christmas and I just wanted to get home to my family, so let it slide. After eating my desert my tray sat on my table for a very long time. I finally had to get up and take my tray back to them because no one came to get it. I feel like being tucked away in that corner of the plane, people just kind of forgot I was there. The staff was very nice though, just not a great service.
Overall the flight was not that bad and was short by about an hour which was nice. I absolutely hate the safety video though. . . .perhaps because I have watched it 100 times now.