After dropping the car off at the hire place, which isn’t something that I usually need to worry about on my trips, it was time to get a British Airways flight back to the UK. Richard went through premium security, but I was content muddling through in the poor lane.
That’s helpful of me, I thought I had taken a photo of the flight screen so that I could mention the time, but I appear to have failed to realise that it had gone to the second page with the flights for the day after. Anyway, it was the BA793 flight at 20:00. Once again I had problems with the BA app, so, to be safe, I printed a boarding pass out at the airport.
Richard had priority boarding and he was anxiously waiting to be called forward with the VIPs, as he had spent a small fortune upgrading to business class. I hadn’t upgraded and I was happy to sit and wait until boarding was nearly complete. I was on an aisle seat near the back of the aircraft, so this wasn’t a problem. Boarding announcements were relatively poor, Richard was standing for 26 minutes and they had said they were about to commence boarding quite early on during that process.
I was pleased to be able to board by the stairs as I like that to see the aircraft registration number, although it was partly hidden here. It was though G-EUYW, an Airbus A320 that BA has had since new in 2014. The boarding was more efficient than the chaotic outbound flight, but there were fewer passengers here for the crew to deal with and there were some issues with a lack of staff for bag storage.
In terms of what I paid, which was £20 each way after Avios discount, I was entirely content. But, the tray table was dirty and so they had clearly made only basic efforts to clean the aircraft between flights. I mention this as Wizz Air, in the last 80 or so flights I’ve taken with them, have never offered me a tray table that wasn’t clean.
On another note, the cabin crew were standing so far forwards during the safety demonstration that it was pointless for us at the back (they were at rows 1, 4 and 14, whilst I was on row 28 and there were rows behind me. Most passengers seem to disregard the safety announcement anyway, but I didn’t have much choice here if I had been interested in following intently. They were doing a safety announcement from row 4 as that’s where the economy section of the cabin started, but it felt slightly sub-optimal. I would add at this stage that I have complete confidence in BA’s broader safety processes and always have had.
Disembarking was more time consuming than ideal as it was from the front only, although that more inconvenienced Richard as he was on row 1 and had to wait for me. This is really a side issue as to just how complex baggage storage is on the flight, there are passengers trying to walk backwards to the only space they could place their bags, it’s just a mess. I accept BA’s service style and the layout of the airport isn’t to have stairs at the rear at Heathrow, but it would have been quicker.
On the positive side, the crew were helpful and engaging, with the benefit of free wifi being particularly useful so I could read messages on WhatsApp. I’m going to do a separate post about the comparison between Wizz Air and British Airways, I’m not at this stage sure who will win on my riveting comparison post, but it’s going to be very close. The provision of wifi might just be enough for BA…..
When I did work for British Airways they said that their problem was that the only thing they were consistent at was inconsistency. I suspect little has changed and I certainly see no reason to fly with them again in the near future.