ba_shambles_

The conventional wisdom has been to travel with British Airways, because if something goes wrong their service will be better.  Yesterday the shambolic demonstration of how not to serve at Terminal 5, Heathrow set about destroying this myth.  Unfortunately BA are the only option for me to travel from

Zurich to Glagow.  However, if competition opened up on this route I would abandon you in an instant.  Bad service does not build loyalty.

My issue is not that bad weather disrupted the flights yesteday, my issue is how badly you managed it, especially the communication. I list my points below.  Please do not come back with a copy and pasted response like your Twitter account did.  I would like a considered response about each point - I am stuck with BA for now, so we might as well try and make it a little better..

1) When landing from Zurich into Heathrow the "wrong" type of steps were brought to the plane.  So we had to wait onboard while a replacement was found.

2) The screens in Terminal 5 did not contain accurate information.  It was not synchronised with the information the BA staff had access to via their computers and iPads.  The announcements over the tannoy were infrequent and barely audible.  For disabled persons, I imagine it would have been impossible to track what was happening.  Worse still, what was displayed was very misleading e.g. saying gate would be announced at 1821, only for nothing to happen for 20 minutes.  This is the worse communication fail I have ever experienced.

3) The BA iOs app did not have accurate information.  My flight showed no estimated departure time at any point.  So it wasn't synchornised with terminal 5 screens, which themselves were not sycnhronised with the information BA staff had access to.

4)  I queued at the "Customer Service" desks in Terminal 5 for 20 minutes.  Two of these were not staffed.  When I got to the front of the queue I was told this desk cannot deal with ticket changes.  This is NOT communicated. It should have a sign saying "No ticket changes" or something!

5)  At some point we were told to go to gate A19 for the flight to Glasgow.  The crew of the aircraft were there too.  Then despite the passengers, crew, boarding staff and aircraft being there we were told to go away as the "aircraft was going nowhere".  Why was this?  The BA staff were as clueless as us.  When one passenger started to complain the lady at checkout walked away from him.  That's not good.  Despicably BA did not remove the gate from the departures board, so passengers who had left the gate were incredibly confused to find it still on the board for over 15 minutes after the cancellation.  I eventually complained to the BA staff member at A19 and he removed it.

6) The later Glasgow flight (1850 I think) left before my 1730 flight.  I think the 1850 also left before the 1550.  Not impressive that a later flight to the same destination gets priority over an earlier flight.

7) Terminal 5 was dirty.  Spills and food deposits on the floor.  Smelly toilets.  I have never seen this as T5.  What on earth was going on.

8) When taking off (over 3 hours late) some baggage needed to be unloaded, due to 2 missing passengers.  This caused another delay as there were no spare escalators.

The whole ordeal makes BA look very bad indeed.  And for international customers passing through T5 it gave the worst possible impression.

Also, please do not try and "pass the buck" to BAA or other companies.  Terminal 5 is BAs supposed flagship terminal and it is BA I purchased my ticket with.  It is 100% BA's responsibility.