Over 6 years ago I wrote a rather scathing "Bye Bye BA" post vowing to never fly BA again. I now regret breaking that promise and wasting our money on a recent trip LHR-DXB//DOH-LHR. We almost booked Gulf Air via BAH but noticed for a couple of hundred quid each extra we could fly BA direct. "How bad can it be?" said Mrs.Bwian, "It saves the connection in BAH and its only short flights anyway". Foolishly I agreed and bought the BA flights which turned out to be nearly £400 each over the Gulf price once the ludicrous seat charges had been added.

So what was so bad?

LHR-DXB:-

• My touchscreen didn't work - had to use the controller thing - not a big deal for me as I only put the map on and then read but for someone else might be bigger issue.
• Supper! What a joke. Only one of us got the only decent thing, the chicken pie as "we prioritise our gold members for choice" so I got 3 prawns on a spoonful of couscous and 2 teaspoons worth of panna cotta with a blackberry.
• Breakfast. Another joke - just a tasteless turkey and cheese bagel. No full cooked option on the menu.
• Mrs Bwian's post take-off drink was served in a glass with a sizeable (20mm) chip in it that gave it a razor sharp edge. When pointed out to the crew she just shrugged and said " So what do you want? Do you want me to get you another one?". No apology, no recognition that a sliver of glass could be in the drink to potentially cause serious injury. Disgraceful response.
• 3rd time's a charm for Mrs. Bwian's headphones. Set 1 right side didn't work. Set 2 crackling noise. Set 3 bingo.
• The film Mrs. Bwian wanted to watch kept crashing every few minutes.
• The seat. It's nice to see BA now only have a 1 decade old design instead of a 2 decade old one but this is so uncomfortable for sleeping. The hard ridge and a gap where the seat and backrest meet adds up to very little sleep.

DOH-LHR:-

• 4 weeks after booking BA122 it got cancelled due to Rolls Royce issues delaying aircraft deliveries apparently. Well aircraft deliveries are planned months and years in advance - not 4 weeks. BA had no right to sell us that flight in the first place as they clearly had no chance of ever fulfilling the flight.
• Logged in to see rebook options and was presented with BA126 6 hours earlier or several QR flights. Great, QR are far better than BA so we'll select one of those. But BA's computer says no. Every time I try I get "oops something went wrong". Try to phone instead - on hold for 45 mins and then "Sorry all our agents are too busy to take any more calls today" and cut off. Really? At 10am you can't handle anymore calls. Tried again anyway but after nearly an hour waiting I gave up. Tried booking the BA126 and that went through OK.
• Checked seat allocation for new flight. No seats allocated. Have to pay additional £25pp to select similar seats to what we had before. This charge is just ridiculous now that all the seats are effectively the same. We just wanted centre seats to be sat side-by-side.
• Mrs. Bwian didn't have any headphones. When she asked the crew member the conversion was "Are you sure? They might be in one of the storage places" - "No, I've checked them all, they're not there" - Leaning over her, he started opening the storages "Well let's just check again anyway". The phrase she used to describe him was rude, condescending tw@t. And he still didn't bring her any headphones. 10 mins later Mrs Bwian's seat neighbour across the aisle asked a different crew member for some headphones and she realised that side of the cabin were all missing headphones.
• Supper! Again! "What would you like for supper?" I was asked. "Well I'm not sure because I haven't seen a menu yet". They'd forgotten to hand out menus on my side of the cabin.
• Breakfast. At least this time there was the option for a full cooked breakfast but it was very low quality. Tasteless scrambled egg and inedible beef bacon. Tough as leather and loads of stringy fatty bits. Ended up leaving half of it.
• LHR baggage delivery. All the priority bags were last on the belt over a hour after we got off the plane.

And finally, the safety video! Words fail me, they really do. I wish I'd paid attention more in English at school to learn the words I need to truly express how atrocious this garbage is. On the first viewing on the outbound I was simply incredulous, I was supposed to be concentrating on the videos message but my mind wandered off thinking about how someone actually proposed this dross, actors, director, cameramen etc actually filmed it and then people signed it off for use. For the return trip I couldn't look. I know I'm supposed to pay attention but my brain wouldn't move my eyes towards the screen. I think it was subconsciously protecting me from being mentally scarred.

How can this airline create such a catalogue of problems in just 2 sectors? Since 2018 we have flown long haul J class on QR, EY, LX, EI, SQ, VN, MH for a total of 32 sectors all flown with zero status. On none of those flights were we ever left feeling 2nd class due to not having status. We never had meals refused (and never even heard of any seat neighbours being refused meals either). Priority baggage always came out quickly. Never paid for seat selection. Never had cause to think a crew member was being rude or useless. Yet BA managed to disappoint at every step from booking to final baggage claim.

Had these flights been OK - not even spectacular but just OK - we would have booked with BA to SIN for a jaunt around Asia next March but we have just booked MH to KUL instead. Not going to hurt BAs bottom line in the slightest but makes us feel a lot better not giving them another penny.

So why do some many of you still do it? Why do you throw away good money on such a p___ poor excuse for an airline? There's so much better out there, especially when flying east.

Many years ago I used to champion BA and recommend them to family/friends/colleagues but BA now isn't even a shadow of its former self - it's completely unrecognisable except for the name on the side of the aircraft.

So this time when we say never again, it really will be never again.