Longest Delay Ever At London Heathrow Airport
Flying during the busy Christmas vacation period is one of the worst things you can do although being delayed in London for 2 days allowed me to grab a few beers downtown before catching my flight back to Toronto.
I never visited London by night so this was a great opportunity to go. Together with some other guys who were also stranded by British Airways we decided to grab a cab and drive downtown.
We checked out the London Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, W Hotel, Chinatown and had a beer at O'Neill's.
We went back by cab in the early morning. London is definitely a beautiful place to see at night.
My flight back to Toronto started off quite hectic on Sunday. I made a mistake on my schedule and almost missed my flight to London, UK where I was connecting to Toronto.
To British Airways - 2012/01/06 - Time to go home. Due to bad weather in London we were stuck at Schiphol airport. After 2 hours of waiting we finally departed but I was certain that I missed my connecting flight to Toronto.
Heathrow was a total disaster upon arrival. The queues at the rebooking booths were 4 hours minimum at such the British Airways staff didn't allow any more stranded passengers to rebook and provided some of us with hotel vouchers and a number to call in order to rebook by phone.
After an hour on hold I was told I had to contact my travel agent. After calling iTravel they told me the ball was in British Airways' court and they couldn't help me.
Again after hours on hold I finally secured a ticket on the British Airways flight 99 for Tuesday (48 hours later), I couldn't get a seat earlier due to overselling of seats and all other flights connecting to Toronto were sold out as well.
I couldn't be happier to know I was finally going home at last.
2012/01/07 - The hotel. The Premier Inn was a very poor hotel with a crappy restaurant where we were suppose to redeem our vouchers from British Airways. Luckily I was able to do work at the hotel on the Monday.
2012/01/08 - 48 hours after my supposed departure. Tuesday came along and off I went to Heathrow. The aircraft was boarding on time as scheduled and everything seemed to be smooth sailing. My thoughts were wrong once again. Alarms systems came in the aircraft and we were told that engineers had to reload system software and do a whole bunch of tests which obviously was going to take hours.
We have been kept in the plane waiting for at least 2.5 hours until finally a decision was made and the entire plane was powered down. After the turned the plane back on eveything seemed to work normally. Seriously, why didn't they do that the first 30 minutes?
So on top of being 48 hours late, my final flight also had a 3 hour delay. British Airways is an absolute disaster, who is running this company?
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