Having been caught up in the Spanish disruptions yesterday I can tell you that indeed Madrid probably managed things better than Heathrow would have (still a war zone, however) ,and BA still managed unfortunately to disappoint.

I was on the BA460 yesterday which was supposed to depart at 1:10. I was on the loading ramp for the plane when my wife texted me with news of the Spanish power outages. I should have listened to my “spidey senses”, but I got on the plane anyways. The pilot to his credit made an announcement about the problems and allowed people to disembark if they wanted to. After that, the doors were closed and we sat on the ground until a revised departure at 3 pm.

We arrived in Madrid at about 17:30 and were parked at a remote stand. One bus came to take the first group of passengers off, but then there was no second bus for approximately 50 minutes. I was not able to get on the first bus, so while waiting spoke to the head cabin crew chap who was trying to be helpful, but unfortunately sent me into an afternoon of further mishap with bad advice.

The meeting that I was attending in Madrid was cancelled because of all the travel disruptions so I half jokingly told him that in an ideal world I just stay on the plane and fly back to London with them. He told me that indeed he could ask the ground agent who was waiting for the bus to arrive to get me rescheduled on their evening return flight. Not to elaborate on the story but when the bus finally came, I had to run through the terminal, immigration, blag my way through security without a ticket, to find my way at the departure desk S11 where they told me that the ground agents were not authorised to do that, there was no ticket for me. I would have to take the train back to terminal 4 to the BA desk to get rescheduled. There is no mobile service available in Spain at the time so I could not call BA. Then I trained all the way back to terminal four, and upon finding the BA check-in desk, I’m told that they’re actually Iberia staff and they’re not able to do anything with BA tickets. In fact, there was no one on the ground in Madrid that can alter BA ticket.

So BA, sharing an ownership with Iberia, have no one on the ground in Madrid that can help passengers.

Now abandoning my efforts to get home same day, I needed to find my way to my hotel. The taxi queue (pictured) took almost 3 hours. I arrived at my hotel at 22:50.

The Spanish crowds were pretty civil in standing in line and waiting for people to sort them out. All of the lines in the terminal were huge and like every airport they’re clearly under staff to deal with any of these unexpected emergencies. There was back up power and some level of lighting in the terminals. There were more than the normal number of police on the ground.

I accept that sometimes life doesn’t go as you would want and there’s no one specific to blame, but I am disappointed that there is no one on the ground from British Airways that can support passengers. It’s also disappointing that I was given information on what I should do to extract myself from the crisis and it turned out to be wrong.


Taxi queue from hell.