Why you shouldn’t fly British Airways

British Airways is pathetic. I have given them considerably more than £10,000 worth of businees over the past couple of years and yet when I make a simple spelling mistake on a booking they insist on charging me £25.

This is the kind of service I have come to expect from British Airways, a national “premium service” carrier with no accountability to its customers whatsoever. I thought I’d check what the budget airlines charge for minor spelling mistake correction, so I called Easyjet and was told they do not charge for this!!

I guess thats why Easyjet are now making all the right headlines and British Airways stagger from one disaster to the next:

It lost 20,000 passengers’ bags, was fined £270 million for collusion and one-third of its flights were late, but British Airways still managed to hike its profits by 26 per cent this summer. (Link)

This incident has also reminded me of my worst airline incident to date, it happened back in April 2007 in Chicago, and yet AGAIN British Airways were at fault. At the time I wrote a letter to BA detailing the incident, I am still waiting for a response, 8 months later……

Read the letter detailing my ordeal below:

Dear Sir/Madam

I had a terrible experience on my recent flight to Chicago. I landed in Chicago to be told that my bag had not been sent. No reason, it just hadn’t been sent. The weather outside was a brisk -4 degrees, I had no gloves, no hat, no jacket. Just the clothes I flew in, a t-shirt and a light sweater. The service desk BA staff, after much protestation on my part, told me eventually that I could spend USD50 on sundry items and that I could claim the money back when I was next at O’Hare, thats what I was verbally told!!!

I was also told a courier company will contact me to arrange delivery of my bagagge. I left O’Hare really bitter at the shoddy way BA had handled this experience, I also left the airport freezing cold and exposed to snow flurries wearing clothes that were more suitable for a 20 deg C day not -4deg C!!

That night at about 10pm I received a phone call from a delivery company who said they would deliver my bags between 8.30am and 11am the next morning. I thought, fine, I will wait around for them to drop my bags off. The next morning at 7.45 my phone rang, I was still asleep, when I got to my phone 10 minutes later the delivery man who called told me that because I did not answer the phone immediately he wasn’t sure if I was home or not so he left my bags at the airport. He told me he had already started his delivery rounds and so he could now only deliver the bag between 1pm and 5pm. I was only in Chicago for 1 day and this meant that my entire trip to Chicago would have been wasted had I sat at my friends apartment all day for my luggage. I decided to drive to O’Hare airport at least an hour away to collect my luggage. I called BA to confirm where my luggage was and because the bags had been handed over to a delivery company they considered the incident closed, in short they told me via a recorded message that the problem was no longer theirs. It took me a further 1,5 hours before I finally obtained my bag at O’Hare airport from the particularly tardy J&W Deliveries. They had left my luggage on the other side of security and of course I was not allowed to pass, so somebody from their dispatch had to come back to the airport whilst I waited there to retrieve my bag.

I was not asked to sign anything or produce any form of identification whatsoever to prove I was indeed the owner of the bag.

I then decided that seeing as I was at O’Hare I would find the BA desk and try and claim some of the receipts I had kept for the essential toiletry items I had purchased such as Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shaving equipment etc. admittedly all to the value of less than the $50 I had been verbally promised.

I went to the BA desk at 11.30am and nobody was around, I asked airport information where I could find somebody from BA and she told me there would only be somebody from BA arriving in the “afternoon sometime”. I continued searching the airport but did not see a single BA staff member. I left O’Hare and headed back into Chicago at about 12.30pm.

I consider this to be the worst customer service I have ever experienced at the hands of an airline with a reputation like BA, and I have now come to the resolute conclusion that British Airways just DOES NOT CARE about the welfare of its paying passengers.

In addition to this fiasco I did not get any Executive club miles for this flight, it appears my card details weren’t added to this particular flight. This is BA’s fault as I specifically asked for this at the check in desk.

I am trying to reclaim the mileage on this site but was left frustrated by a process which asks me for a ticket number when all I have is a booking number, a booking number which is enough to pay for a flight and actually get on an airplane but apparently not enough to actually try and reclaim Executive club miles!

My day in Chicago was ruined because of BA and now one of the reasons I actually choose to fly with BA, the executive club, has not incorporated the mileage for what was an utterly horrid experience at the hands of a company that should know better.

Regards

David Fisher