Last Saturday I did the 50 minute JNB-MRU-JNB turnaround to collect my AONE4 ticket. The experience wasn't for the faint hearted! None of the Servisair (handling agents) ground staff meeting the flight from JNB knew anything about my ticket and it took them about 25 minutes to locate it. I subsequently learned that the Servisair supervisor had been taken sick and had not briefed her team about the arrangements that BA had made with her. My ticket was actually at the BA check-in desk and had to be brought through to the departure gate where it was handed to me 20 minutes before the MRU-JNB departure.

Today I received a nice email reply from BA at MRU and they assured me that they would do their best to ensure that this would not happen again. The normal procedure is that a Servisair agent will identify themselves to the disembarking passenger at the earliest possible moment and hand over the ticket.

So, it all worked out OK in the end, but for a few minutes when I was standing in the immigration hall at MRU wondering what to do next, it did start to cross my mind that I could be stranded in Mauritius for a week until the next MRU-JNB flight. I suppose there are worse fates, but it would have been very inconvenient to say the least.

Here are a few things to bear in mind if you plan to do this rapid turnaround in MRU. BA do not have a ticket office at the airport and hence there are no BA staff there. Everything seems to be done by their ground handling agents, Servisair, at the airport. The Servisair staff are very friendly and helpful and did manage to give me the assistance that I needed. If anybody should find themselves in the same situation as me, then I would advise against going through immigration and turning up at the BA check-in desks because you could lose valuable time and possibly find that the check-in had closed. Better to wait in the immigration hall and find one of the Servisair people to help you out. An Air Seychelles 767 arrives at MRU five minutes after the BA/Comair flight from JNB and so the immigration hall can get quite crowded. However, there is a transit gate with its own secuiry checkpoint between this hall and the departure lounge, so that is by far the best way to get through to the departure gate for the MRU-JNB flight. However, you either need a boarding pass to get through this route or (as happened to me) a Servisair agent will escort you through.

Because of the delay in locating my ticket, I didn't have any time to relax at MRU and try out the BA Executive Club lounge. It was a rather stressful experience but I suppose that these things can and do occasionally happen. Its all part of RTW travel!