Life as we know it

“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats”

Voltaire

26th & 27th May

Though we did not get back to the hotel until after 1:00am in the early hours of the morning of 26th May, The Girl was awake again at 4:30am and calling BA on the phone. Following a lengthy exchange she was able to get our Johannesburg flight switched to the following day, 27^th May. We rebooked our connecting flights in Africa accordingly.

At around 10:00am I took a taxi back to Terminal 5 to try to locate our luggage. There were long queues of unhappy passengers outside the baggage office but they were not answering any queries. The BA management staff in the terminal would only say that we must log our missing baggage online and await a response. There was a heavy security presence in the terminal which was a good thing as the arrivals hall was teeming with unhappy travelers. Whilst I was there one hysterical young lady threw herself at one of the BA managers – apparently (though perhaps unsurprisingly) aiming to do him some harm. Shortly thereafter the security presence was reinforced by police officers. I beat a retreat.

During the afternoon we tried to log our missing bags online but the system was not working properly and would not record the details. We spent several more hours on the phone to BA and the missing luggage was finally appropriately recorded.

On waking on the morning of the 27^th May we found that we had been sent email notifications overnight to the effect that our safari bags had been flown to Johannesburg on 26^th May, but were by that time enroute back to the UK – though on different flights. A rapid calculation of flight times made it very clear that we could not be reunited with our bags in time to check in for that evening’s flight.

As detailed in my initial Africa posting, our trip was to have been a safari, staying in remote lodges (without wifi, Internet or cellular access) and traveling between them in small planes. We had purchased bags specifically sized to the requirements of these internal flights (maximum (W) 10” x (H) 12” x (L) 24”) and all of our clothing and other accoutrements had been chosen to be as small/light as possible.

We were supposed to have flown to Johannesburg, switched within a few hours to a local airline for the short hop to Maun, where we would have been met off the plane and transferred immediately to a small aircraft to be flown to the first safari lodge. There was no feasible way that we could have replaced our missing luggage whilst on the journey and without these items there was no possibility of completing the trip as planned. We had by this point rebooked our African internal flights twice – with no hope of a refund – and it felt as though we were just spending more and more money with no guarantee of being able to reach any of our destinations.

With immense reluctance we decided that we had no choice but to abandon our trip of a lifetime and to head back to Canada.

Much of the 27^th May was taken up with a series of phone calls to BA, trying to change our booking to get us back to Victoria by any route. The BA agents told us that it was not possible to do this without paying extra charges and that we would have to find a further $1,500 CAD each to get home via Vancouver. This was adding insult upon injury for something that was never our fault.  We were not – at any point in the whole sorry saga – offered by BA the alternative of abandoning our trip and going home.

Again it seemed as though we had no choice but to pay up, which we reluctantly did on the afternoon of the 27th May. Further anxiety was induced when BA initially charged the wrong amount to my credit card, which – when they subsequently corrected it – resulted in my card being blocked until I had made another international call to my credit card company to resolve the issue.

We flew back to Victoria via Vancouver on 30^th May, after the Bank Holiday on the 29^th and, to our surprise (having received no notification), found my wife’s missing safari bag on the baggage carousel at Vancouver. It was another four days before I finally received notification that my bag was also enroute to Victoria and I had to go to the airport myself on the 4^th June to collect it.

The whole experience was enormously stressful for us both. We did everything we could to join our safari and to continue the trip, but British Airways thwarted us at every step. We are well aware that BA has form in such matters and that this not by any means being the first such IT related incident. Little – if anything – seems to have been learned about how to resolve such self-inflicted issues.

With the exception of the small number of staff who did their best to support anxious and confused passengers, British Airway’s handling of the whole sorry saga was in the main obstructive, unhelpful and dismissive.Their only response (when questioned) was to state that all must be resolved online – which is richly ironic given that their IT systems were in meltdown. When we resorted to the inevitably extremely lengthy phone calls (during which we were almost driven insane by the endlessly repeated ‘hold music’) we found ourselves speaking to agents who were clearly a very long way away on different sides of the planet and who were equipped with a limited script outwith which they could not venture. Anything further meant an agonising wait for a call-back (which might or might not materialise) to inform us of the outcome of some other unknowable procedure that had been suggested by a faceless BA ‘supervisor’.

If I give the impression that we are angry about the whole fiasco – then that is because we are! We are still trying to recover whatever we can of the considerable outlay that we had made on this supposed trip of a lifetime, but as you might expect – BA (and others) do not make it easy so to do.

Well – I think… I hope!… that that is quite enough about this particular subject.

Moving on!…

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”

Henry David Thoreau

Thursday 25th May

On Thursday May 25^th  – having taken a couple of nights to recover from our extended flight from Canada – The Girl and I arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5 a little after 2:00pm to check-in for our 7:05pm flight to Johannesburg. We had attempted to check-in online before leaving for the airport but the online system was not working. On arrival at the terminal, we found that none of the check-in stations were working either. We were told at the Club Class check-in desk that there had been a major IT systems failure (the which would ultimately lead to well over 200 flights being cancelled). We were checked in by hand and headed for the Club Lounge.

We could immediately see from the departure displays that European and domestic flights were being cancelled in increasing numbers, though long-distance flights seemed at that point still to be operating. At around 5:00pm there was an announcement that all European and domestic flights after 6:00pm would be cancelled – and shortly thereafter came an announcement that our flight would be delayed overnight!

As we had a connection in Johannesburg for an onward flight to Maun – in Botswana – to join our safari, we immediately endeavoured to find an alternative flight that would arrive in time. We were directed to a variety of different gates, waited patiently in queues, talked to BA reps who had no idea what was going on… but it was clear that they really just wanted people to leave the airport and to go away. After a couple of hours of this we finally we gave up and returned to the Club Lounge. We enquired at the BA desk there and the agent was able to find spaces on a later BA flight – scheduled to depart at 9:25pm. We were only able to get economy seats, but we felt this was worth the trouble as we had a connecting flight and a safari to join.

As soon as the departure gate was announced we headed for Satellite C and joined the throng of passengers already there. We could see the aircraft from the gate but shortly afterwards there was tannoy announcement that this flight would also be delayed.  We learned that the aircraft had a mechanical fault which was being worked on. As time passed all of us at the gate grew increasingly concerned that the flight would not get away and, sure enough – at around 11:30pm – it was finally cancelled. By this stage we had been in the terminal for nearly 10 hours.

We were told that we must leave the satellite and walk back through the underground passageways (alongside the no-longer operating transit system) to the main terminal building – collect our baggage from the allotted carousel and make our own arrangements to stay the night somewhere.  As this was likely the last flight that was cancelled that day, the thousands of other disrupted passengers had already found accommodation and there were no hotel rooms to be had anywhere in the vicinity.

Our luggage did not appear on the carousel. The only BA staff in the terminal rapidly disappeared and there was no-one to assist us. Whilst I searched for our bags The Girl contacted the Club World Desk to enquire about flights the following day. She was told that they were fully booked and that there was nothing that could be done to help us.  I called the hotel at which we had been staying for the previous few nights and they took pity on us and found us a room.

My brother – extraordinarily kindly – went above and beyond in getting out of bed and driving over to the airport to rescue us and to take us to the hotel. We definitely owe him for that (and for many other things) – big time!

The day had been exhausting and scary… in that we had no idea what would happen next, or how we might save our trip of a lifetime from coming to a premature and expensive end. To find out how things turned out the gentle reader must needs check in to the final installment of this saga…

…next time!