atsak

It's so interesting how different things can be on the same airline. This is a tale of some minor woe, so I appreciate you all letting me vent.

Last week the family took a trip from Toronto to Scotland to visit the in-laws and friends (my wife is Scottish), on an Avios redemption; all 5 seats round trip for 250000 points and $1000; this is excellent in my view by todays standards. Our trip over was smooth - Toronto was busy with the impending Spring break but Nexus security was prompt if disorganized. We all found something to eat because the Plaza premium lounge was full. and plane food is hit or miss The five of us were down the back of the bus, and BA seated our family together at no charge (typically I pay for seats to avoid risk but our kids are older now and it doesn't matter as much, and BA charges far too much - I'll pay $20 or something, but not $70 each). This was an A350 - beautiful plane, comfortable, bin space no problem even though it was full, AVOD was working, wifi working, courteous and prompt crew etc. Arrived on time. Transiting Heathrow went well - it was busy but not insane, got into the Plaza Premium lounge no issue to get something to eat during our layover, and flight to Scotland departed late due to misconnecting passengers, but that was fine.

Now the issues. Now one or two things I think are reasonable in any flight, and by themselves none of these things would be a major issue, but in aggregate this really started to get disappointing on the way home. To be honest I can't think of a flight I've been more disappointed with. I would have been even more so if I had paid in dollars and not redeemed Avios for it.

BA's android app is useless. I think it showed the gate once in the four flights (GLA-LHR) - it doesn't show where your luggage is, it didn't show the delays, where planes are if they're coming from somewhere else etc. Flightaware to the rescue.
On the way home, the flight left Scotland late because boarding didn't start on time, but there was no communication about it . We had a long layover so it didn't matter.
Group 1 was half the plane. That's worse than United, American or Air Canada.
Heathrow was so busy the flight connections train was packed and the doors wouldn't close. I couldn't find signs to just walk.
There was no where to sit for 5 of us in the general A gate area, and we did not know where our flight would depart from.
Both the Aspire and Plaza premium lounges were full with wait lists of 1 - 2 hours. All the table service restaurants were full.
We eventually found an unused gate area to setup camp which worked fine.
I went to duty free to take some champagne home, but they were sold out in all stores.
The gate was supposed to to display at 15:30, but did not until 4PM I think. Our BA99 was scheduled to depart at 5:05, so I already knew it wouldn't happen, but BA didn't update the delay. I hate this system "gate will display at". Build the airport so you can go to your gate in advance and wait there in case there's updates.
When we got to the B gates, they were boarding 2 flights from our gate at the same time ,first JFK then Toronto, and a 3rd flight to Boston was in the adjacent gate. There were over 1000 people in an area for 300 or so.
Eventually, at just about 4:50, our flight started boarding. Slowly. In fact, they had ONE person checking passports. They had no one helping with instructions for biometrics, so it failed about 30% of the time for glasses or masks or whatever it doesn't work for. This fortunately didn't matter since the passport check was so slow it was irrelevant.
Once on board, there was no bin space left as this was the old 777 with 3/3/3 seats and terrible lockers because flight attendants weren't reminding people to put their small bags under their seats. A few questions from me later and I had a single space for our one carry on for the five of us.
None of the flight attendants were tall enough to close most of the bins, so I helped them with that. My bag is exactly 21" long, so to close in these old bins without being horizontal like most other people had to do you have to carefully do it holding the handle in. When the bin was full, I closed it. It was opened 6 more times during the flight by people and flight attendants looking for space. On arrival they didn't close it properly and it opened on landing.
There were two people at the back hacking up a storm. Please don't' travel when sick or wear a mask if you must.
The AVOD was laughable and the screens so marked up it wasn't watchable; my kids were laughing at it. I could not fit my laptop as the person in front reclined all the way, but that is fine I just watched my phone.
There was no power. That was fine we had batteries. We had to help a couple other passengers out who had expected in 2023 to have at least USB power on a wide body longhaul plane. The wifi worked, just slowly.
Dinner took 3 hours to serve. The crew was very courteous though, so that helped.
Toronto was a zoo, our first two bags came out in 10 minutes, the last one took another 50.
The Uber driver can't read instructions and came to the wrong place to pick us up (not BA's fault, just another annoyance, this is a big problem in Toronto though about 25% of the time).

The seats were comfortable - lots of padding and space as they were 3/3/3 not 3/4/3 like most other 777s.

All in all the ending of our trip was just so disappointing. I'm used to that with Air Canada, but honestly this was on another level . It's such a contrast to travelling BA 15 or 20 years ago when I was barely out of school. They used to absolutely be a standard above Air Canada and other North American airlines.

I understand things are busy these days and we were travelling on a Friday, but for goodness sakes do things properly like communicating delays in a meaningful way (ie an app that works), managing boarding, and try please to keep your planes up to date with reasonable AVOD, overhead lockers etc. It was one annoyance after another. I pine for the days when travel was sort of fun.

Thanks for letting me vent.

corporate-wage-slave

Ok, so I would lay money on you getting G-YMMU on your flight back. The one and only aircraft with an interior of that vintage. If you want to share the date of departure we can check that and see if my theory is correct. It really shouldn't be flying for BA, and it is due to be refitted in the next few weeks (April?) but you can see the contrast with the A350 here. As you noted, though, if it was purely seat comfort, MMU has some things going for it in WT.

For the passageways, there is a very detailed guide in this forum, I would suggest you peruse the BA Forum Dashboard, there are a number of areas there which would have made your experience a lot easier. But you can see the logic here - if there were 1,000 people at the gate with 75 minutes warning, imagine that if there was twice that on 120 minutes warning. Note that the transits are one way, and people get confused by them as it is, so you can't just change gates easily here.

Ldnn1

Walking from B to C the other day, I witnessed two passengers separately run past me in the opposite direction looking a little concerned. Not sure what either had done but it can indeed throw people.

Re the OP's complaints, the one thing that surprises me is that there was no bin space left on a 777. I've very rarely heard of the bins completely filling up on a widebody.

RockyRobin

I had sympathy until you turned it into a maskivist thing.

Good luck.

corporate-wage-slave

If it was YMMU then their cabin space can be limited in specific areas, but there would have been space somewhere else nearby.

orbitmic

Sounds more like a tale of two tails to me!

newEUer

Is there a way to check this for BA283 on 29/01/23? Flew Y to LAX and despite middle seat being free was horrible, even armrests didn't go entirely up.

atsak

That's a weird way to single out your individual issues, but fair enough I suppose. I do think it's courteous to wear one if you're feeling actively sick I suppose, but this rant wasn't about that at all.

atsak

Ya it was G-YMMU. I'm glad they are refitting it. That probably would have killed half these issues, but it's embarrassing it's taken them so long.

I totally get there's probably better ways to do what we had to do, but that should be signed. Between terminals I walked (from 5 to 3) pretty easily in January so I think it can be done easily. Even a poster suggesting "trains busy? Try walking by following this map" would probably have helped but of course that's easily missed.

Thanks for commiserating.

corporate-wage-slave

No, that was a 789, a relatively new aircraft, G-ZBKE to be precise. That should have had a AVOD screen bigger than a postcard and more than 12 dpi,, but 789s aren't great in WT for a different reason, the passenger space is very compact. You would have found YMMU tatty but relatively spacious.

corporate-wage-slave

It's signed in the lifts / elevators but these get pretty packed, and there is also a sign at the entry to the lifts. There's a further sign at the end of the platform since there is another way to get to the passageways there.

atsak

Oh, we took escalators. I didn't look at the lifts. I couldn't get to the end of the platform it was blocked with people. Well that was just bad luck I guess on my part then.

beachmouse

I feel like airport regulars and a lot of the irregulars know how to time leaving the lounge or retail/shopping zone so they get to the gate with 15 minutes to go before the start of boarding. The only folks who are there 120 minutes before are typically the folks with takeaway they wanted to eat in a less crowded spot than the food court or who are looking for a little room for their small humans to run around and burn off some energy without bothering the grown ups so much. All the current system does is force the duty free zone to be extremely overcrowded, which is the point, and make it harder for passengers to evenly distribute over the larger concourse because everyone’s stuck looking for gate information on the screens.

Eh, as someone who had too many holidays screwed up from 2013-2017 because of bugs picked on planes including getting stuck next to folks who were visibly ill on flights without room to get reseated, I’m all for encouraging folks who are ill to try to keep their germs to themselves on the flight.

Can I help you

You were unlucky to get that aircraft and I can understand your displeasure but most of your other complaints are nothing to do with BA.

tennessetom

Honestly, if this is what you are the most disappointed in you haven’t flown enough or have had rather good luck. Keep in mind when you travel abroad sometimes things just are different to what they are at home, when gates are assigned being one of those things it is the way it is done in many countries I am not a fan of the way ba boards but some how in all the mess it works so I just deal with it