Veerle's Brit Air Horror Story

Veerle is a beautiful, world class Belgian designer. Your going to love the work she did for Scrapblog when it goes live later this month. She joins a recent parade of people relating first-person airline horror stories lately, this one with British Air.

I seem to recall having one myself and British Air. It was sort of an On The Road story involving me and my luggage constantly trying to reunite while BA played the evil genius who kept putting me and my suit case in different countries. They had a parade of employee characters all deliver the same line: "I can't tell you how dreadfull sorry I am about all this. They also featured a lost luggage hotline that told you after a 20 minute wait that BA was too busy so I should hang up and go to the window and plunge to my death.

Airlines are very much like the Internet. They ae networks.  We count on them.  When the networks break and there is no one there to help us, it really hurts. When we are paying customer, it really pisses us off.  We recover from the messed up flight and lost luggage.  But when we don't get proper support, we remember it for a long time and we tell others about it.

Comments

[Katie Konrath]

I too have had fun with British Airlines. When I was working as a traveling assistant for a business expert, I was seated in the back of the plane. When we landed, for some reason, BA hadn't been able to bring us to a gate. They instead parked us far away, and brought 2 buses out on the tarmac to bring everyone in.

As you can imagine, with a transatlantic 747 carrying 500+ people, it took a long, long, long time to unload. Meanwhile, we had to wait on the plane and the pilot switched off the engines (and the air).

Of course, I was horrified. Not only did I have to wait for half an hour on an crowded, stuffy plane, but my boss (who had disembarked with the business class passengers right away) had to wait for me as well.

I simply can't imagine why BA didn't get more than two buses to unload, especially since Heathrow is a BA hub!