Of course it isn’t the same. But the principles of being on the receiving end of poor service are generally well established the world over. You take it up with the staff in the first instance, then up a level if you don’t achieve satisfaction. I’m not sure why anyone would need to come on an Internet forum to elicit that sort of information.

However the crux of the matter is that there is one rule that’s generally set in stone; that by and large you should have received the poor service to be able to make a complaint about it. Maybe when time travel comes in then we won’t have to.

To be fair, I’d give the OP the benefit of the doubt that they had received sub-par service in the past. The truth is though...there’s nothing we can do about it other than feed back to BA. There is an issue on MF with high turnover of crew and sometimes there aren’t enough F trained staff. On WW, given recruitment closed in, what, 2006? the most junior staff on the plane now have c13 years’ experience and some have many more. On an A380 with 22 or 23 cabin crew you can see the difference. That’s not an attack on MF - they generally try very hard but if you or I were put into a position where we had to work a full F cabin without training, and if all of our colleagues in that cabin had maybe worked in it 2 or 3 times on other aircraft types things are going to run slowly. Where do they keep the tablecloths, what’s this fishy looking thing they’ve loaded? How do A380 ovens compare to 747 ovens. I keep hearing call bells but how do I know what seat they’re in? The CSM don’t forget has service responsibilities in CW after the first bar service (I think). Sometimes there are enough F trained crew & then there shouldn’t be an issue - just the usual everyone is human and will get on well or not so well with other humans and care more or less about doing a good job, which is common across all fleets!

Why JNB? Could be a mix of passenger demographic - perhaps a higher number of FTers so we hear about issues more, could be timing of flight that makes slowness / inexperience shine through and so on. We have similar complaints about WW crewed HKG to LHR flights and the automatic assumption there is ‘hung over legacy crew’. We don’t get complaints about ex-SIN even though departure times are similar.

I maintain that going onto a flight expecting the worst is a recipe for a bad flight, but MF does have its own issues, which are created by BA and entirely within BA’s gift to fix.

Your thread title was not very optimistic...

God help you when you get to your late 60’s! Just be grateful you’re flying F in you’re late 30’s Many people go through life never flying Business let alone F.

Could you explain that by deciding before you had taken the flight that it was going to be a bad one and asking for advice on how to deal with it, how that fits the definition of ‘optimistic’ and making the ‘best of the flight’? I’m interested to know what you’d think was a pessimistic approach!

And let’s be honest. You weren’t ‘telling it like it is’. You hadn’t taken the flight before you started criticising it.

The staff here do not represent BA, but knowing the amount of time we spend on here in our own time I am sure that we have very expectations and are highly motivated.
I have recently flown with someone who posts on here and they are exceptional crew member and in my opinion in the top 1% of any crew that I have ever worked with.