The Odyssey: One for the Books (Part 3)
Just realized I never tied this story up, and before I forget anything I wanted to get it on the record.
I wrote Part 2 in Leeds on Sunday. We spent one more night in Leeds and got up Monday morning to get onto a bus. The bus took about six hours to roll into Heathrow considering traffic and bad roads.
When we got into Heathrow almost everything was shut down as far as flights go. It was really eerie in there, I described it like the hum in a football stadium when a player is down with an injury.
The general instruction was to leave the terminal and try to either call or get online to “rebook.” It was not extremely clear what it meant to rebook. Earlier, the communcations implied we just needed to wait until the scheduling people found us the proper continuing flight given the disruption. As the chaos scaled up, it became clear everyone was out for themselves, just trying to slip onto an already-full flight to get home as soon as possible.
BA continued to be good to us throughout, with the one exception that they KNEW the phone and internet options were totally hopeless. It unfortunately became more important for them to clear the terminal than it was to provide people with realistic solutions or news. The phones were completely full (you couldn’t even be on hold) and the internet tool just disabled rebooking for all the cancelled flights. This was borderline unethical communication from them, in my view.
BA, at least, was giving out hotel vouchers. This made things very nice, except that the standby lines opened at 4:45 AM the next day (there was no available customer service by the time we got in on Monday). The trains do not run that early, so it was tempting to sleep in the airport to make sure we were in a good position in line.
We opted for the hotel and decided we would catch a taxi to Heathrow early in the morning to get in line. That was a good call, especially since…
There are no lines in Heathrow.
The whole thing was structured to remove the advantage of staying in the terminal overnight. The waiting area was the shape of a wedge, with multiple entrances, essentially preventing any sort of line from forming. A lot of people only found that out when they woke up in the morning and discovered they were not in line.
It’s a good thing we got in early, because – line or not – the flight to Turkey was the first flight that morning to be posted on standby. We were two of the last people to get onto the flight, which allowed us to get back to Turkey and get a nice flight to Houston via Chicago.
So that’s the story!