Our holiday of a lifetime from Australia to the UK in 2007 was spoiled by abysmal British Airways "customer service". We booked through Qantas and didn't really want to fly BA but they operate a code share service where we flew Qantas to Singapore and then British Airways from Singapore to London and then on to Aberdeen.
The first issue was when we arrived in Aberdeen to find one of our bags was missing. In 30 years of flying this was the first time I had ever had baggage misplaced but I must admit, I hadn't flown British Airways much. The bag eventually showed up three days later and fortunately we were still in the area to receive it.
On our return journey things got much worse. Our BA domestic flight was over 2 hours late so our international flight was long gone by the time we arrived at Heathrow. We queued for over an hour in Flight Connections at Heathrow Airport until nearly midnight. Flight Connections organised a hotel for the night and managed to book us on a Cathay Pacific flight the next day to Hong Kong for our stopover and then Cathay Pacific again back home to Perth, Australia. We were given complimentary courtesy bus vouchers to travel to the hotel but the staff obviously didn't realise the courtesy bus service stopped at midnight so the supplied tickets were useless. It took us an hour to figure this out before paying for a taxi to the hotel. None of this is much fun especially with two children who are tired and fed up in the middle of the night! Flight Connections were unable or unwilling to help with re-booking our hotel accommodation in Hong Kong so we had to do this ourselves via the Internet in Heathrow before we boarded the Cathay Pacific flight.
When we got to the Cathay Pacific check-in the next morning there was a problem with our tickets because “British Airways had not released the ticket”. Cathy Pacific were fantastic and soldiered for half an hour on our behalf calling various numbers and wielding a computer keyboard until they were able to get British Airways to fix whatever it was they had or hadn't done.
On arrival in Hong Kong, all 4 pieces of our checked-in baggage were now misplaced. One piece showed up the next day but it wasn't until three days after we arrived home in Australia that we were reunited with the other three pieces. The bags must have been left out in the weather at some stage as moisture had soaked through to the contents.
When we checked in at Hong Kong to fly home to Perth, there was a repeat ordeal with "unreleased" tickets but at least we had been pre-warned by the wonderful Cathy Pacific staff and made sure we had checked in early to allow for this.
Due to the misplaced bags and changes in our flights, we had costs associated with transport, buying clothes to wear on holiday, rebooking hotel accommodation and so on and this totalled over AU$650.
British Airways ground staff in Aberdeen had advised us to contact our local British Airways office when we got back home to submit a claim. We did this but nobody seemed able to get back to us to explain how to submit a claim. Eventually I put everything in writing and mailed it to British Airways Customer Relations in the UK. This was answered in a reasonable time frame and I was asked to forward receipts which I did. About six weeks later, I received a letter to let me know that a cheque for AU$666.41 was being issued. Despite many follow ups via mail and email over the next six months or so, the cheque never arrived and they didn't even acknowledge my correspondence.
It's very frustrating when the "customer service" department stops responding to your enquiries and it seems there is very little you can do.
I eventually gave up hope of ever receiving a cheque from British Airways. I registered britishairwayssucks.org and created this website to tell my story about British Airways, to allow others to tell their stories about British Airways and to warn other travellers.
It's not much of a comfort but I realise now that my experience of British Airways "customer service" is not an isolated incident. We will never fly British Airways ever again and will never fly through Heathrow Airport.
