Whilst we head into the Passenger Experience Week in Hamburg, I’m in the middle of my own troubles, caused primarily by British Airways.
I doubt it.
Earlier, the first bag was delayed. Then went missing. It turns out, they’ve reflighted the bag without informing me (in this term, re-flighted means the bag was switched from flying aboard BA294 to BA296).
To put it bluntly – this has caused a stinking pile of crap at my end, as that bag had things I needed. Namely clothes as I’m off to Hamburg in a bit.
But here’s the thing. I had to wait nearly 40 minutes for all the bags to come out, 20 minutes to wait to be seen before I was told in under two minutes my bag had re-flighted.
There are many different ways this could have been handled to improve the service
- Actually deliver the bag on the same flight as me. A shocking concept – but there you go.
- Contact me on arrival by email. text (which British Airways stores in my PNR) to tell me that my bags are being delayed.
- Or actually inform me that the bag wasn’t loaded at Chicago O’Hare International
That’s just a few touchpoints I can think of off to the top of my head. Instead, I’ve wasted nearly two hours in the arrivals zone sorting out this mess, trying to get a bag re-flighted onto Hamburg, and spending £270 on a shirt and trousers.
All because of a lack of communication, and my bag not being where it’s meant to be.
The bag is in WorldTrace – so all being well – it should meet me in Hamburg sometime (which is actually more inconvenient that it needs to be), but for now – I’m just going have to play the waiitng game for a bit.
So much for a relaxing start to the Passenger Experience Week.
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I haven’t flown BA in over a decade, but it looks like some things never change…they’ve always seem to have had a problem with the concept that it’s their job to move your bags too.
For 270 quid they better be some really nice clothes 🙂
As soon as my bag doesn’t show up in the first 50-75% of bags (meaning the crowd has thinned considerably) I walk over to the airline counter and have them scan my bag tag and tell me where it is, i.e. should I go back and keep waiting or fill out a form and leave.
What would be ideal is offering that scan feature at the baggage claim area so people could DO THIS ON THEIR OWN without waiting in line. It is ridiculous this can’t happen like at Kohl’s or Target where they have a place every few aisles to scan an item to find out the price, in this case they could have a quick scanner to do this next to each baggage belt and let people know. Yes ideally the airline would pro-actively text or email the customer but the scanner would fix this gap or help those who don’t have an intimate relationship with that airline.
The good news is that you get something like 25 euro every day its gone, right? at least for now…