written by Sindhurajaramji on 12/12/2014
First of all to start with the booking.. i used a 3rd party site to book my trip from Bangalore to San Francisco and my return journey. Booking through that site was pretty easy.
I was disappointed that i had to pay extra to choose my seats. So i had to wait until the day before we flew.. to checkin online and choose my seats.
Our 1st lag from BLR to LHR (Heathrow) was ok. We liked the fact that the seats were comfortable compared to a few other airlines like cathay..
Temperature control - There were no knobs to control the air condition...neither cud we see any vents. The entire flight was a little warm.
The entertainment system was super crappy. The display to start with...was too small and not clear. the control system was on the handle bar and not a wired remote. The sound quality was terrible unlike many other flights (Qatar/Singapore airways)
On our return flight from SFO to LHR the headphones jack dint even work.
Food - We chose indian vegetarian as i had read reviews on lacto ovo that i might end up getting bland food. The quality of the food was good.
Service - The 1st and last lag (BLR-LHR and LHR-BLR) had indian attendants who were pretty courteous. However BA did not offer any Hot towels or wet wipes.. socks or eye masks.
The LHR-SFO and SFO-LHR flights had British attendants and i found one of them totally unfair to us. My drink spilled all over me and my tray and all i had was one paper napkin and my husband offered another. When i asked the attendant for more napkins he refused to give me any and told me to go to the bathroom myself to grab some more. The drink was all over my tray and needed to clean the tray before i cud even get up from my seat.
Then comes the airport. Heathrow airport is one pain in the a** airport....
I had clearly packed all my liquids in 1qt ziplock bags..put them in a separate tray. Our security line was clogging because someone else did not pack their bags according to instructions..the lady who was checking their bags was going through each and every pocket,.. boxes and packets inside the bags..While my tray which only had 2 transparent ziplock bags was stuck behind for 20 minutes for a recheck.
My husband was holding himself to use the bathroom and when he raised his voice to make the checking quick, one of the guys in charge there told my husband that he was ONLY there for the last 20 mins and was "shouting and creating a scene" for absolutely nothing.
Then they decided to check our tray and found that one of the items in my ziplock bag was NOT A LIQUID !!! it was only a small box containing my retainers. It took them 5 long minutes to check my small ziplock bags which were totally see through. What was the fuss all about ???
The only advantage we had over BA was flying through London which split our journey exactly in half...10hrs + 10hrs....
But after all this... am not taking BA again or ever flying through London.