March 29, 2008

How not to do it - air travel and British Airways

From BoingBoing:
British Airways loses 15-20,000 bags since Thursday at supremely b0rked Heathrow Terminal 5
The much-ballyhooed opening of Heathrow's �4 billion Terminal 5 has been a debacle. British Airways has canceled 208 flights since Thursday, and has "stranded" between 15,000 and 20,000 bags. Area hotels are crammed with stuck BA passengers and are gouging on pricing, prompting BA to lift its stingy (and possibly illegal) �100 limit on hotels for stuck passengers. This is the terminal with the crackpot fingerprinting procedure -- passengers are fingerprinted at check-in and at boarding.

And lest you think you might try to get there with a change of underwear by going hand-baggage only, think again. BA's baggage-checkers are being serious rules-lawyers about hand-luggage limits, forcing passengers to check hand-bags that are less than an inch oversize, dooming the luggage to the nonfunctional baggage system at T5.
Makes the TSA look positivly benign... Posted by DaveH at March 29, 2008 12:07 PM