boadh398

Let's put this simply as other's have already done on here:

BS are not up to the job, and whoever decided on the idea of a non continuous buffet at a flagship lounge in the home airport needs their head(s) looking at. I hardly believe that Frank is responsible for this and can only assume it is the bean-counters stating that BA can either have great lounge food and offerings or buy new aircraft, but not both......

tbm13

I know I'm not adding anything new but I'm also disappointed about the removal of hot food in the afternoon.

I'm also disappointed that this wasn't communicated. I went to the lounge recently and decided to check my email before grabbing some food. Big mistake as I discovered that they had just removed the food when I finally went over at 15:05.

I guess I have to follow FT more closely. (I don't know if this has been mentioned already but I can only find salted Kettle crips these days... no more cheese or vinegar anymore. Instead they introduced some weird rice crackers...)

deccoo

Echoing similar sentiments from my lounge experience before my recent 17.50 flight to IST (landing 23.40 local time).

As the ET food experience can be a mixed bag (if I am being very kind), I was planning to eat my main meal for the evening before the flight in GC. Of course, under the new regime this was not possible and had to settle for afternoon tea.

Although the quality was solid (carrot cake excellent, sandwiches average with a large bread to filling ratio) its not quite the full evening meal I was looking for.

If cost is the real issue for BA having an all day buffet, I would at least start it at 5pm to give people some chance of getting a proper hot meal before some of the evening flights. However, in principle I think an all day buffet is the right thing to do as a global airline at one of the preeminent global hubs.

FrancisA

Great post accurately reflecting what will confront LHR premium and status passengers.

You shouldn't have to read FT as you shouldn't expect a major carrier in their home hub to offer such limited choice during the day.

The Kettle Chip issue is right. As part of BA's move to "improved variety and choice", only one flavour of Kettle Chips is available in all lounges including the CCR. This is because this is what BA's customers want!

At the other end of the spectrum, BA have moved from good quality pre-packed biscuits from Walkers, to hand-made luxury biscuits - a truly premium product that costs three times as much. These are not reserved as a treat in the CCR or FLounge, they are put out in every lounge

To me this seems to be the economics of the mad house. Yes, the biscuits are very nice (they should be at $7 per 100g). However, I use the lounge food to supplement or replace the on-board offering (I always fly in a premium cabin so always have a food offering). I like to eat healthy, nutritional low fat food as a proper meal. I don't want high calorie sugary/fatty snacks (however good quality). I have no objection to BA putting out those sort of things for those that want them and by all means genuinely enhance the quality, if the budget will stretch to it. But please don't do that at the expense of the core basic food offerings.

BA's management seem to have a view of lounge use that suggests it is a luxury treat. As a leisure traveller that used to be how I viewed it. However, as you travel more, you come to use the lounge differently and use the food offering as an integral part of your meal plans on your travel days. Undermine that and the quest to find alternative meal arrangements will quickly lead to making alternative travel arrangements.

I am now firmly in the camp of those who will not be actively seeking to retain gold. I can get to silver with no effort at all and it would seem that that would give me hardly any significant loss of benefits that I actually use, if the lounge catering offering remains so degraded.

TheSafariMan

These new changes are horrible. Both my wife & I flew through T5 just this week and the selection and quality of the food between 8am and 11am in GC was just awful. It was all bread products with some limited fruit and other assorted snacks, but nothing like what there used to be for breakfast... If their intent is to have us switch to Virgin or some other airline that actually cares about the passenger experience, they are doing a fine job!

I am really disappointed by all of these cost-cutting maneuvers, and am seriously questioning my loyalty to an airline which cannot offer a decent meal (or Business Class experience, for that matter).

wyvern

It's gone downhill.

When you are travelling times morph in any case so the key thing is to have decent hot food available at any time the lounge is open - breakfast until 11.30am, lunch from 11.30am until 5.30pm, dinner from 5.30pm until close would mean no-one misses out. Some may want afternoon tea, but plenty will want some hot food mid-afternoon, as they may have missed breakfast and lunch, or be about to miss dinner. Scones and pastries can available all day, but there is no need to take the hot food off. Looking at the throughput of people visiting lounge, while there will be a morning and evening peak it probably does not drop off all day in the major lounges.

I'd rather see the food improved and the alcohol cut back to fewer choices, if cost is an issue.

I'd also like to see more than just sandwiches in the regional and European lounges - why not some hot food there too - or at least decent salad bars rather than a very poor selection of sandwiches which has not changed in several years.

vscxfan

The quality, variety and presentation of food in T5 GF has not only declined but is now below what is offered both by competitors like SQ and VS and by alternative OW carriers such as AA and CX in what isn't even their main hub.

BA (not least in its fatuous response) has managed simultaneously to insult its most loyal and lucrative passengers, reveal a fundamental ignorance of (or contempt for) good customer relations and let down its shareholders.

I suggest some basic guidelines if BA wants to recover the lost goodwill:

1) If it looks like a restaurant, it shouldn't be run as a canteen or cafeteria.
2) For pax in transit, food should be better than you had on the plane.
3) For originating pax, food should be better than you'll get on the plane.
4) For non-BA OWE, food should match standard offered at their home hub.
5) Flatter us by reinstating at least one thing posters have asked for.

missdimeaner

I am a passenger that has been to the 'poor cousin' LGW Club lounge since the 'enhanced catering'.

It was 5.50am and I could have done with something like beans on toast...fat chance.
Apart from the cheese option there was absolutely no savoury items.
Whilst some people may downgrade the importance of food hygiene, not all of us are blessed with perfect health, or the ability to eat anything (coeliacs, lactose intolerance, diabetics ...etc, etc.)

Huge bowls of yoghurt are not appetising let alone very hygienic (yes that word again and yes it IS important).

I might only be a blue but my cash has gone on a CE ticket which should enable me to grab a bite to eat (thank goodness for the on board breakfast, although I'd gone a very long time since waking by then).

I could get a V&T at 5.50am (not that I'd want to) but nothing savoury apart from some cheese that looked like it was left over from the day before.

I did notice that as food items were depleted, they were not replenished....nor were there near enough serving implements put out (I would expect 1 per item at least).

My only hope is that some of this feedback will fall on ears that are merely 'hard of hearing' and not totally deaf at BA.

Perhaps things will improve, the lounge at AMS has actually had two items improve since last time (small stroopwaffles and 'Old Amsterdam' pre packed cheese rather that the Gouda).

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands in compo Avios will be sent to discontented/ disappointed customers in the next few weeks.

It's all enough to make me want a V&T at 5.50am !

BigEyedFish

I disagree with this - ok, the HOT breakfast has not changed much, but the cold options have been reduced significantly. Ok, I admit that I get in to the lounge due to my EXP status with AA, so in theory I 'shouldn't complain', but when I was in the T3 GF a couple of weeks ago, I could no longer eat the 'continental' breakfast that I usually have due to the lack of cold meats and cheeses. Sure it was nice to see some hot options under the unforgiving heat lamps (desiccated bacon, chewy tomatoes, gelatinous scrambled eggs etc), but the cold side of the buffet was something like 3 bowls of things randomly spread around to make it look like the space was filled.

itsmeitisss

I was in GF this afternoon for the first time in months. The buffet is now more like the buffet in Club used to be. Standard has certainly come down. i tried some Beef Bourguignon, and I'm not sure there was any beef in the portion on my plate. It all looked rather poor in my view. Much preferred the Short Rib and mini pies etc that used to be there. So ordered off the menu. I ordered the burger which came well presented although the wedges were cold. The burger was fine and was served on a plank of wood.

I rarely ordered from the menu before even if I had a couple of hours in the lounge. Now I won't bother with the buffet after breakfast. The result will be that by cutting down the budget on the buffet (and that's exactly what it looks like - it's school dinner slop) they will end up with a more labour intensive ordering system.

orbitmic

This is entirely my feeling. BA are of course entitled to their commercial decisions, and if they think that they can get away with it, cutting costs and not losing the numbers of customers that would make this a counter-effective measure, then good for them. It is all a question of numbers and a questions of how various recent positive and negative measures add up to individual passengers.

As a French-based passenger, I often don't have choice but to spend a longish time at Heathrow in between two flights (2 hours or more is often the norm), prices from my home market in both long haul Y and J (both short and long haul) have clearly gone up in the past couple of years, and as we all know, there is no more lower requalification threshold as compared to origin markets where the OW offer is more geographically intuitive hub-wise (and before anyone starts screaming, I always qualified with enough for the 'new' thresholds anyway as I take over 200 flights a year which is more than enough to keep top tier in all three alliances so it is not a 'personal' comment). Finally, having sampled more and more airlines over the past few years, I am now aware that many long haul J products are overall superior to CW, not only in Asia as has long been the case, but also in Europe itself (OS, AZ, LX, etc) and now even North America (which, frankly, when one thinks of the situation a few years ago must have come as a shock).

This is all a question of individual circumstances and I have no intention of 'boycotting' BA or anything like that, they are not horrid at all, but this is one more thing that will encourage me NOT to get out of my way to fly BA when another alternative is more convenient. As mentioned upthread, this has already impacted a few recent bookings and will continue to do so. I find BA's answers - both the general answer posted here (and I don't mean that as a criticism of Nicci at all, I just think she "passed on" the answer that she was given by BA, possibly even fighting our corner to get an answer at all in the first place) and answer to my personal message on the same wholly unhelpful and not containing anything that would encourage me to have any hope about the direction of evolution of BA (be it lounge wise or onboard product wise) in the next few years.

Dan72

I agree that the lounge food is no longer as good as it used to be and that cost cutting appears to be at play.

But I am surpised at the surprise that BA have not acknowledged that this is cost-cutting. What business hands that advantage to competitors, or run-down its product unless unavoidable (eg cessation of service). I do think that some of the posts have more the tone of a jilted lover rather than a disappointed customer.

I am doubtful of the tall claims of people taking their business elsewhere and expect BA know this. Despite the cuts I think the BA lounge provision is still some of the best around. They still beat European and north American competition, which is the majority of BA's business. Even where BA's lounges are poorer, the competition has far more restrictive access than BA's. I can't think of another lounge that allows OWE equivalents traveling on £50 ow fares to have unlimited champagne and a hot meal.

I think BA have been too easy on access. At the opening of T5, perhaps they should have excluded non-connecting ET and domestic travellers from GF. They then might be better placed to provide the service that people feel they warrant.

I think there is a lot of hyperbole here, offered in the feint hope that outrage among FTers will have BA running to Walkers for ambient snacks. (I don't understand the hygiene issue given people seemed happy to choose from the other open food (buffet, pastries etc.) and can only think people lament the opportunity to take-away food, which I am sure has helped shape the current offering).

Petrus

As there is no dedicated thread for Galleries First T3, allow me to post two pictures from that buffet here. This was at 17.10 the other day.





Yep. That was it. In Galleries First, the BA Gold lounge at 5pm in the afternoon. Pathetic BA. It is insulting. Do BA seriously believe people will be buying the hogwash about improvements?

What is seen here in the photos is on par with the outsourced Menzies Lounge at Arlanda in Stockholm.

brutha

Hi all,

In GF lounge at T5..... was expecting the food to be horrific based on the info here, but it really doesn't seem that bad...

Ok, the hot buffet looks essentially inedible (think 1970's school dinners), and there doesn't seem as much salad choice as before, but the snack side of things seems to be improved slightly. And the burger is a bit better than the last one I recall having here!

Alcohol seems more or less unchanged, the johnny walker blue is out (and full!)

Cheers,

rossmacd

Hi all

My first post on FT for a while - mainly due to flying other carriers (and enjoying them)! LX in particular are meeting my needs very well

Also, my first visit to GC since 1st April, and it is not a pretty sight. Yes, I'm only a Silver pleb so my expectations should be as such whilst visiting between the hours of 15:30 and 17:00.

The Afternoon Tea offering is woeful. Sandwiches are vile - the chicken and mayo offering doesn't seem to have have come in contact with a chicken recently and the egg just looks depressing. The ham and mustard is the only edible offering here.

Now onto the cake. Whilst I don't have the sweetest tooth in the world, I do enjoy the odd slice now and again. I sampled the carrot cake this afternoon and it was so full of sugar I had to relegate it to the waste bin. Did BA mention healthy, and fresh?!

Sampled a little bit of soup in order to prepare myself for my 18:00ish flight, the tomato offering was little to write home about.

I am not type of individual to threaten to abandon BA, but I think we are stooping to new lows I'm afraid. Global hub airport of a major global airline should be the pinnacle offering in the network, but it seems J class passengers are now valued with more disdain than ever.

With all that said, I feel I should congratulate BA on the improvements in the MAN lounge I enjoyed on Friday night. Over 3hr delay with the incident unfortunately, but the excellent (as always) lounge staff kept me particularly well lubricated for the duration ^