Originally Posted by
SK AAR
I'm sorry to hear about the issues than you encountered, but one can understand the practical and logistic issues that arises in such extraordinary situations at outstations like PUJ. It is also not difficult to understand that not all of BA or BAH are updated about the delay of this flight; nor will be able to reply to emails on a Sunday afternoon or night (UK time). Expecting that everything can be handled smoothly far away from Europe/the UK in situations like this, is very optimistic IMO. I guess to local ground staff and BA did the best they could to ease this difficult situation as much as possible.
There are a few points here:
1) BA sent all passengers a text message and email advising us to use the Live Chat with a customer service representative as we disembarked the plane. We had no information about what we would do, where we would go, whether we needed to book a new flight/connecting flight. There was absolutely zero communication from the ground staff. The customer service team on the Live Chat were completely unaware we had even disembarked the plane. As far as they were aware, we were delayed but still due to depart in the evening. There is no point BA sending a text message and email advising passengers to use Live Chat if the customer service team do not know the current status.
2) BA Holidays run a 24/7 emergency contact centre specifically for situations like this. I can understand if the booking was with third party tour operator, but the booking was with BA. The emergency contact centre should be aware of situations like this. It's unhelpful for them to email all passengers who had holiday bookings with them at 01:30am local time, some 5 hours after we had disembarked the plane, advising us to return to our original hotels using our own transportation.
3) The ground staff dealing with us were very poor (in the words of one of the cabin crew - PUJ is the worst airport in the Caribbean to have these kind of issues) and certainly did not represent the standards one would expect from BA. They gave the impression that this was an inconvenience for them and they would rather go home. I think that is self-evident by the fact that one family's bags went missing and by the time they got them at around midnight, the ground staff had gone home leaving them to find their own accommodation and transport at an airport that was effectively closed.