videoman

A rainy Sunday morning at LHR. It was nostalgic to come back to Terminal 1 for my flight to TLV. This was the terminal used back when BA Lockheed Tristars flew the TLV route and the Executive Club was nothing more than a £50 a year membership fee to use a separate lounge. Now, nearly four decades later, we are back and Terminal 1 is certainly showing its age. Our departure gate 17 had no fewer than 3 buckets collecting rainwater that streamed through the roof and the gangway had four buckets as we sloshed our way onto the plane.
So, no Fast Track, but through security in three minutes and off to the lounge. No kippers and scrambled egg for breakfast here. The only hot food was porridge and bacon rolls.
Gate 17 is wholly inadequate for the passenger load of an A321 and with a forty minute delay, the floor or standing were the only options for late arrivals. Our plane, still in BMI colours, had only just arrived. The gate agents, still dressed in BMI uniforms, announced pre-boarding for assistance and young children. After two such calls they finally remembered to mention Club World and GCH could also board, but by then the everyone had totally blocked the boarding area and chaos reigned.
Being a single aisle plane it took much longer to get everyone on board (and off again).
Smaller overhead lockers, even in Club, are inadequate for all the hand luggage (there are no lockers over exit row 7).
An hour late, we finally left the gate. The safety demonstration was entirely in English and not a word of Hebrew was spoken during the whole flight, apart from a simple ‘todah rabah’ during a crew announcement as we arrived in TLV.
Seat 7F is the worst in Club as it is directly against the emergency door. Worse, none of the controls worked. In fact, while the Club section has 23 seats, two were broken so BA could only sell 21 expensive tickets today. In my case, it took two cabin crew on their hands and knees trying to find an elusive switch somewhere under the seat. After half an hour sitting in the take off position the switch was found and my seat finally came to life. The crew had less success with the IFE. The CSD needed some sort of code to get it started and he didn’t have the code. Thus the passengers spent the first ninety minutes staring at a screens advertising BMI.
On the now abandoned 777 services, a drinks cart would normally start the flight with a bag of Kenyans nuts. No such thing here. The pre take-off water, juice. champagne were offered, but we saw nothing more for almost two hours into the flight when breakfast was finally served. No priority here for GCH. Orders were taken from the front row back. Confusingly, my menu was in English and Arabic. When my turn finally came, they discovered they had passed out some menus for the Amman flight. The correct menu promised a snacks galley, but apart from offering a drink, there was just no room for the nibbles offered on a 777.
The lone toilet for 23 Club paaengers (+ crew and the unchallenged economy passengers who wandered through the curtain) was inadequate. In the three Club toilets on a 777 you could at least find a paper cup to swill down some of the previous mess, but here the only option was to ask for a bottle of Highland water to make the tiny cubicle useable.
Finally, no duty free offered as they just didn’t have room for it.
On arrival at TLV we parked ironically next to a Lufthansa A321. How the might have fallen! Only a few months ago BA was parking its 777 and LH its 747 here.
Was this the end of the A321 saga? Not quite. There was one final black mark against the new service. The 777 loaded luggage in containers. The A321 requires bags loaded individually, so the waiting time at the carousel was twice as long. And because of the downpour in London, my bags were SOAKED inside and out as they sat in the rain at LHR to be loaded. Our hotel room looked like a Chinese laundry with wet clothes everywhere hanging out to dry.
Conclusions: the five hour journey to TLV can, of course, be made in smaller planes (ask Easyjet), but if you are going to pay for Club World BA, the £1,000+ ticket price is not worth it on this route (except perhaps the overnight). No amount of gloss or new seats can disguise the A321 service is a downgrade to what BA offered with its wide-bodies from terminal 5. The ticket price and Avios availability need to be more reasonable for what is on offer.
The crew were experienced BA staff. Even though they had been given training with the new service, they were still struggling to make things work properly.
After announcing the change, BA has had some months to get this right, but just hasn't. Ironically, BMI used to fly the TLV route with an A330 which was great.
BA is seriously damaging their Club World brand with this experiment. Either resume a proper wide body service, or downgrade this to its previous status (in the era of those Tristars) as a CE product. The fancy seats just don’t justify the price.

colmc

No room for hand luggage?

Over-egging the pudding slightly..

GLA

Sounds pretty bad all round. I think I would be pretty annoyed if I travelled this route regularly. Have you sent feedback?

Now not so bothered that I've been "downgraded" from a 777 to a tatty old 767 to IAD on Friday!

Skipcool3

~And the BMI A330-200 is being parted out and broken up. Seems mad.~

TCX69

The seats adjacent to L2 & R2 (7A/F) have to be deactivated for take-off and landing due to their very close proximity to the doors. This should of been the first thing the R2 crew member did after take-off though, to turn it on! All bmi cabin crew got trained on the operation of the new seats, I'm not sure about BA cabin crew.

As for the IFE, for future reference 'bmicrew' is the code to activate the IFE So at least the IFE can also be switched on after take-off!

The A321 is most definitely not the B777 or B747 space wise, it is disappointing hearing some not so good comments about it though when th majority of the comments from bmi passengers were positive.

Don't even get me started!

cornishsimon

Seems to be a few teething problems with the new mid haul routes and aircraft !!!!!

Very disappointing to hear

cs

clubman

Why not? or was the fast track lane closed for some reason?

They might be smaller than the 777's but certainly not compared to the 767s.
The carry on I had with me the other day was pretty big and fully extended and I got it in to the overhead locker with no struggle what so ever which is more than I can say for the 767 where I was forever struggling.

Nothing new there - what were you expecting?

Nice touch if you ask me.

That's bad, on my flight (as you can read in my trip report) it was just my screen that wouldn't work while the others seemed ok from what I could see.

I wouldn't know as I had no luggage but generally I have had endless issues retrieving my luggage at TLV, once it's a strike, the next my case turns up at the other side of the hall so nowhere near the carousel etc etc...

The difference is LH are now flying with an Euro configuration.

I agree the service is a hit a miss at the moment as the crew seem to still be getting used to the new configuration for some reason, never mind the delays which are getting beyond a joke (none of the flights are leaving even close to their scheduled time) but to wish for a CE configured aircraft, well no thank you! once they get their act together I'm sure all will be fine, and if you think offering a CE configuration on the route would have much of an impact on the prices you're wrong.

antichef

It will be even funnier if this happens again and a know-it-all FT'er can tell the crew how to do it!!

clubman

Indeed, and many of them being discussed in these two threads:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...confirmed.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...ip-report.html


The delays at the moment are the biggest issue.

videoman

It's a week later and I am now inbound TLV-LHR on the BA166, enjoying a few unexpected surprises.
First of all, BA now has a dedicated lounge at TLV. Even though run and staffed by Dan Hotels, it is a huge improvement over the cramped, shared old Dan lounge.
Staff will serve you a basket of bread rolls and snacking items at your seat, along with drinks. They also call flight departure.
Today's 166 was late departing (no surprise there), having started the day from BEI-LHR and then over to TLV.
The flight itself was managed by an efficient crew who did a drinks service and hot meal within the first hour and had the IFE working just minutes after take-off.
Being one of the last flights of the day into LHR, there was no circling and Terminal One was deserted, apart from passport control, so exit was really quick. Luggage waiting on the carousel and out into the cold night air of London.
In all, a much more positive experience. If they could just get the three daily flights to operate on time!

Littlegirl

Glad your return flight was good.

Your original CSD just sounds like he/she was unaware of the product and had not prepared properly for the service. BA have provided plenty of information for the crew but of course crew do need to read it and do some perpetration.

Hopefully you were just unlucky.

Dave Z

The A321 takes AKH containers for baggage/cargo. It's not a bulk-load aircraft.

Littlegirl

I believe that all the exbmi Airbus aircraft are bulk loaded but I am not sure why.

clubman

That's good to hear beacouse I heard they were using a tinny little room now with nothing but a few snacks (so no soup or salads etc like in the other lounge) so glad if this isn't the case (even if less relevant to me as I use the KD lounge most of the time even when flying BA).

Flights have always been called from the Dan lounges.

Dave Z

Really? Very strange. I know all my airlines 321s are setup for containers and never noticed any other carriers that were bulk-load only. A 319 would be a hard enough job to load/unload by hand.