British Airways not your bag?


The Wall Street Journal's "Middle Seat" column today by Scott McCartney takes on British Airways atrocious bag handling system -- but with a far less passionate pen than the Brit papers did earlier this month when we were there.

The Telegraph had a package of stories from the auction house where British Airways takes all the luggage it's given up on trying to return to its customers. Supposedly BA gives those profits to charity.

From today's WSJ:

British Airways, the world's second-largest airline in international passenger traffic, mishandled 28 bags per 1,000 passengers in the second quarter this year, a rate that is twice as bad as the worst U.S. major airline, US Airways Group Inc. In all, British Airways has lost the bags of more than 550,000 customers in the first half of this year.

For our part this trip, we had no problems with bags, security or delays (except that the pilot announced we'd have to sit at the gate an extra 10 minutes before the U.S. TSA approved the final passenger list.) However, we're now in the habit of getting to Heathrow several hours earlier than necessary to allow for problems. And as another Brit paper pointed out, BAA, the Spanish-owned operator of all the main London airports, has been criticized for devoting too much of the airport to retail shops and not enough to expanding space for say, security checkpoints, customs, and oh baggage. While we were spending a lot of quality time at the British Airways lounge last week, we had a full view of a stretch of the baggage handlers at "work." They were so leisurely at their pace, even sending down a pot of tea probably wouldn't have slowed them down further.

Labels: london

- posted by Amy @ 8/21/2007 07:22:00 AM