Tafflyer

The first wave of the cull is over. Only BA954 and BA960 cancelled for tomorrow, 6th December, so far..

Crampedin13A

The fact they have already cancelled 2 of 6 says to me I�ll be getting the cancellation email at 6 am tomorrow for my flight

Tafflyer

Well, Lufthansa has already cancelled 5 of 9 tomorrow, and they are normally slower to cancel than BA, so there is hope.

Tafflyer

My cancellation mail never arrived and BA950 ran almost exactly on schedule today. My irrop is over and now I just need to collate and submit my receipts. Munich airport was empty except from the 50m long lines at immigration which are normal for non-schengen these days.

All the best for your flight home. I hope you were as fortunate as me today.

Crampedin13A

Yes thanks it did. Flight took off on time at 16:00 and I was landside at T5 with my checked bag by 5:35. So glad the 4 days of my personal Planes,Trains and Automobiles is over and now relaxing with a pint I hope BA doesn�t quibble over the �640 bill for the 4 hotel nights I�ll be submitting

corporate-wage-slave

DId you get the impression there were a lot of BA customers still stranded (e.g. middle seating in CE?).

Crampedin13A

i had 3C next to me empty and so was1C. No use of the middle seats

LH302

Glad to hear that you managed to complete your trip.

For similar extreme events like this, I recommend also looking at Prague as an alternative airport - it�s a smooth 4-hour car ride away from Munich, so not much further than Stuttgart (2.5 hours) or Frankfurt (3 hours).

Tafflyer

No, not at all. In fact 1F was empty until taken by a charming BA crew member travelling out to crew the return flight.

I was also surprised to see empty seats. The previous day�s flights on both BA and LH were all cancelled.

Within Germany one-way car rentals are affordable. Internationally, not. Trains from Prague were also disrupted so that was no use. I could have routed to Stuttgart or Frankfurt a day earlier but did not attempt it because at the time of rebooking there were still seats direct to Munich to be had. It�s just that these were subsequently cancelled. This level of disruption in and around Munich has not been known for many years due to declining snowfall. Munich airport cleared as much snow in 1 night as in the whole of the last winter.

Crampedin13A

What complicated this was DB being a total mess as well so while it was definitely an option to try to get out of FRA there was no guarantee of getting up there. In my 2 week trip to Germany even before the snow every ICE booking I had was changed multiple times or cancelled outright in one case with 20 minutes warning. I can�t believe what an unreliable mess DB has become. They used to be great. Also thanks for the help and suggestions from people on this forum during this unusually long disruption

VSLover

mustve been quickly back to normal as i took the 750pm last night LHR-MUC and more than a few empty CE seats.

DB on the other hand...here i thought getting to T5 was a disaster enough (but seemingly made it 40mins before things really went left), and the endless DB delays only put the cherry on top!

adrianlondon

Yep; DB has gotten so bad that the German trains coming into Switzerland often get forcibly terminated in Basel (and sometimes at the German station in Basel rather than the main one) so as not to disrupt our lovely punctual trains.

Sunday Times article: https://archive.ph/3SKkC

In my opinion, the trains in Switzerland are on time partly due to the timetable being so heavily padded that it's relatively easy to make up time if necessary.

alanjed

We finally got out of MUC Wednesday night on LH2310 and 21:00 scheduled departure. Airport was pretty empty by then, although our flight was full. Pushed back on time, but there was an engine startup issue and we returned to a gate and waited for maintenance. Ultimately tech declared the engine good, just had been sitting idle and icy cold for five days. Finally departed 1 1/2 hours late. We were pretty stressed over this as we had a 09:15 departure AMS-PDX on DL179 the next morning, which I had been rebooking daily as our flight out of MUC kept getting cancelled.

Fortunately we had been able to extend our hotel room daily, so had a place to stay through all the mess.

By Wednesday the lines at the DB Info office at the Munich Hauptbahnhof had shrunk considerably as well. (We were passing through there daily to take the U-Bahn or S-Bahn).

Weather wasn't done with us quite yet thought. We finally got lights out at the Schiphol Hilton at about 01:30, then up and 06:00. Boarded DL179 on time, only to sit at the gate for another 2 1/2 hours. AMS was experiencing freezing fog, the de-icing station was backed up, so planes couldn't push back, thus arriving flights couldn't park, taxiways logjam, etc. Net about 13 hours on plane for what should have been a 10:45 flight.

decowie1903

To give BA credit, we had about �600 in expenses / duty of care for a Munich trip via Stuttgart.
We had the receipts & claim in on Monday and received a phone call Thursday saying everything was processed.

(I queried the phonecall as previously it has just been an email and the agent said this was quicker)

flarmip

I had the same phone call in resolution of a complaint. Unfortunately I missed it but am email was along shortly afterwards. For once it actually seemed like my complaint had been read and a proper explanation was given!

Perhaps there's hope for BA customer services yet...