Ive had better service from South West trains (British Airways in general)

Member Name: jaylad

Product:	British Airways in general
Date:	21/10/01 (508 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Food was nice

Disadvantages: Entertainment system, Legroom, Width of seats, Grumpy crew

I had rarely used British Airways before this trip and I won’t be in a rush to use them again! I was flying to Havana, Cuba. I bought the ticket months ago because it was with BA and not Iberia (didn’t want to go via Madrid) and this meant I was paying a bit more for the direct flight from Gatwick. What I would say to others – don’t pay more just to fly BA on longhaul flights. It just isn’t worth it!

There are only 2 flights a week to Havana. I was wondering if this was because they aren’t making any money on the route, or they just weren’t interested in Havana. Well its both!
Everything from check-in to baggage handling seems to take an absolute age with British Airways. I got to Gatwick to check-in and for starters the place was so busy you couldn’t move (nobody to blame for that). The departure screens didn’t actually have our flight on them so I had to walk around each zone to find where our flight was checking-in. I found it, and there was a huge queue with just 2 staff checking people in. This took about half an hour, so off to immigration which had the longest queue you have ever seen. I was actually shaking like a leaf anyway because this was 8 days after the attacks in the US, and only a few days after US airspace had been restored (which we have to fly through). I was quite comforted by the extra security and it went quite quick in the end.

After getting to the gate, I saw that we were on a Boeing 777! Nice and new they may be, but BA have three ‘ultra cramped’ 777’s and yep if your flying to Montego Bay, Cancun, Tampa or Havana – your eyes should start to water!!! If your not crying then, you certainly will be when sitting in the ‘baby sized’ economy seating!!! The seats are in a totally crazy 10 abreast arrangement which means that the seats are smaller than they usually are with BA. The legroom… well there isn’t any!

One
thing BA hype-up about these aircraft are the seat-back TV’s you get for every seat. So theoretically, you get 12 channels of your choice.
In reality, 2 channels weren’t working. The ‘SkyMap’ gave out wrong information saying that we were at 37,000 feet when we were infact still on the ground! All the channels are pretty boring, and the sound quality of the headphones was a joke. The people next to me got through 3 sets before they found some that actually worked. I was looking forward to seeing one of the films but within 5 minutes I had such a bad headache I couldn’t go through with it! The buttons to change the channel are on your armrest, and this leads to no end of fun when the person next to you falls asleep with their arm pressing against the channel changer – meaning your TV is flicking through the channels, along with the overhead reading light flashing away!
Within 3 hours of flying (and it’s a 9 hour flight) every channel came to an end and for an hour we sat there with no entertainment whatsoever. I had to actually ask why the TV’s weren’t working, and the stewardess then said she would change the tape. This then happened again 3 hours later and I cant believe that I was the only person out of 400 people that noticed the TV’s had stopped working!

The cabin crew looked pretty fed-up. But then again, most of them were probably seeing redundancy at the end of the month so you couldn’t blame them. One stewardess dropped 3 sealed bottles of water over me whilst I was asleep, they weren’t open but they landed on my head! The best example surely must have been when we hit bad turbulence and the chief crew member said on the tannoy “don’t complain about the seat-belt signs being on ladies and gentlemen, just return to your seats and be quiet”!

One good thing was amazingly the food, however. You are given mini menu’s beforehand and can choose
one of 2 dishes. The food was in large portions and had some chocolate, desert, rolls and salad with it. When I asked for 1 drink of Coke, they gave me 5 cans! Great!

Just a shame that BA cant solve that irritating TV entertainment system and then that would take away half the problems!! Oh and don’t mention that SkyMap again! Sort it out BA!!!!!!

Summary: