British airways

I had the misfortune to travel British airways recently (long haul) and it was painful; the marketing encouraged me to check in on the WEB site, but upon visiting the site it wouldn't allow me to complete the process, claiming that certain passport information was missing (my passport number), then when I tried to enter that information the page just puked putting me into an endless loop (technically the page state was incorrectly set to update mode when I wasn't in update mode, i.e. it thought I was changing existing data when in fact I was entering new data, a corruption of view-state). Now I would be more sympathetic if I weren't a long standing 20+ year member of their executive club (where you pre-register all your passport details), and over the years have probably chalked up more than five hundred long haul flights with that particular airline.

This time I was travelling with my family and the default seat allocation had us all over the cabin, when I tried to change the seating on-line it first told me the cost would be £25 per change (since when did that happen?) and then when I actually tried to change anything it put me back into the endless loop previously mentioned - I gave up with the WEB site, checking in the old fashioned way without incident on the day of travel. On the plane I didn't do much better, my AV system was completely buggered (a technical term), the volume altered itself randomly and the overhead light kept flicking on and off, obviously a short circuit somewhere, the cabin staff could not help having tried to reset the system several times we eventually gave up and switched it all off; I resigned myself to reading a book for 10 hours.

This is all a great shame, a superficial comparison between now and a couple of years ago when I used to do a couple of long haul trips a month would suggest to me that this is a company is in decline; when you start charging for things that don't actually cost you anything that's a big red flag in my book; when your key systems are simply broken another red flag, when you forget about loyal customers who have lots of choices that's the final nail in your coffin; Virgin do it better.

Here's a photo from my apartment balcony, see if you can figure out where I was...