ermis177

I am sure we can find many reasons that contributes by 1% to this chaos but lets be honest its BA. Covid, Brexit, supply issues due to the war, we have heard everything. I just came back from Brazil and i used 4 different airlines (Swiss, Azul, Gol, Latam) and more than 10 airports. Not a single time i experienced this dreadful experience we can see in the photos. It is amazing how once again we managed to acuse the passenger for this chaos instead of the obvious one. Also many places around the world have relaxed most of covid restrictions and we see this chaos with BA every weekend...

KARFA

What would you say the issue(s) were at check in which resulted in this bottleneck for outbound passengers? And how could they be addressed to reduce the problem?

VSLover

what confuses me re the first wing is as compared to pre-covid, there are far fewer routes with first so today even with all or nearly all desks open, why is it such a mess? is the morning schedule today so drastically different than pre-covid to warrant this type of queue? are the additional OWE really adding to this compared to pre-covid?

xenole

All these people who had their Gold cards extended for another year

Tobias-UK

Now I appreciate you like to be critical at every opportunity, but, dealing specifically with the post of mine you responded to, given we were told First Wing security was 'quick' and the First Lounge didn't appear busy, and there being no suggestion that insufficient desks were opened in the First Wing, and there being no mention of any IT issues, and no mention of insufficient staff at the First Wing, what do you think was the issue in the First Wing this morning if you don’t accept a contributing factor to those delays "might" be because "some" passengers were unprepared with their COVID documentation or VeriFly?

BahrainLad

Sending an email and then asking me to visit a website and find my destination etc etc is just far too many steps in the chain. When EasyJet can send me a text with the precise instructions right within the message, why can’t BA?

Example text from EasyJet prior to a flight to Faro:

ermis177

Not enough staff obviously. How to resolve the problem? Where do i start....

Offer incentives when people want to do overtime, for example 1.5X of the salary. Secondly, offer some good wages to your staff. I am not sure how many people will apply and how motivated will be with a 20k +shift pay salary. I just had a quick look and this is the salary for customer service representantive role. The job description includes ' provide differentiated service to premium customers'. Not sure how this can be achieved with poverty salaries.

ermis177

Firstly, thanks for appreciating that. I also appreciate your recent experiences in First and your contribution to the forum. I am almost convinced that the same exactly food choices and desserts we see in J and F are completely different in F with higher quality ingredients... We only had 1 report that the lounge did not appear to be busy so i cannot comment on that. I can only comment what i can see
Last as i said i am sure there would be a very small portion of passengers with the wrong documents but again this should not cause the same issue every weekend right? Also BA had 2+ years to get prepared for that.

The big picture is that BA knows exactly what they are doing and its a cost cutting excersise. A very recent example is club europe. At the moment club europe food is superior to what Swiss or Lufthansa offers in many short haul destinations. The problem is that it took BA more than 2 years to revert back to what it should to offer due to all sort of lame excuses when we all know it was about cost cutting.

KARFA

I don’t think it is that obvious unfortunately since my experience today and previously is pretty much all check in desks are staffed.

Tobias-UK

You can take a horse to water …

MaxFlyer

It still been closed every time I’ve passed by.

mikeyfly

Tonight’s LHR-GLA-LHR hasn’t been catered for Y or CE. Lounge agent telling passengers now, £15 voucher being given out for those in rows 1-5

SW7London

What are the issues which cause T5 to be a worse experience than other airports? Lack of physical check in desks which cant be easily fixed?

Regardless it makes the overall BA proposition less attractive!

corporate-wage-slave

One factor here is the concept of Ready to Fly didn't envisage a world where multiple pieces of paper needed checking by humans, with different pieces of paper per country, and potentially sub-sets within 1 country (e.g. for children). So the LCC practice of a final check of HBO passengers at the gate before boarding doesn't sit well with this, nor would BA want to be returning bags from the warehouse because people have misunderstood the rules.

This is what I would do
- Give up on VeriFLY and use Salesforce for all locations - and get slick at processing paperwork, calling people if something needs checking or re-sending.
- Go as far as possible with OLCI producing boarding papers, printing ADOC if Salesforce came up OK
- In T5 have the main countries listed out for rapid manual checks at specialist desks - France, Spain, Italy, USA etc
- These desks can then stamp ADOC on the boarding passes / give a sticker for App check-ins - send people on to the self service drop machines
- The self service drop machine queues then have someone on a tablet enabling RtF for all ADOCs.
- Encourage Goldies to embrace the system to avoid the queues. Eeek.
- Try to keep people turning up no more than 2.5 hours to departure on Saturday mornings.

mustafina

And all those people who spent enough on their BA Holiday to get free access to the First Wing .. I imagine that will all calm down after the end of March when the offer ends!