Heads we win, Tails you loose is the mantra of British Airways and Iberia one of the worlds largest operators of aircraft that purports to look after passengers seeking to fly trouble free around the world.
Passengers have to arrive ahead of time to take a flight and if they do not, they are in trouble! But if British Airways are late, guess what? It’s the passenger who is in trouble
Everyone knows that bad weather can delay flights and almost everyone can understand the reasons and accommodate the consequences but surely it behoves the supplier of the service to go that extra mile and put things right.
So when we saw our British Airways flight operated by Iberia was going to be delayed we realised that we would miss our connection to Santiago in Chile. When we checked the departures board there were two earlier flights to Madrid and both would take off before our own delayed flight. We reasoned, if we could get on board either of them, we might still make that connection.
All we had to do was get in a queue and wait to speak to a customer relations assistant.
There are six desks for such people inside terminal five but even though the queue was some 50 people deep, just three desks were manned by staff working for what was once called the worlds favourite airline.
Try as they might, those three people simply could not cope with the traffic of disappointed passengers and one by one the flights that could have got us to Madrid in time for our connection closed.
The end result was that we, and about 80 or so other disappointed passengers were off loaded late in Madrid and instead of changing to our Santiago bound flight were shuttled off to a rather smelly hotel where we were forced to spend the night all because British Airways do not have the ability to cope with bad weather.
Maybe airline officials had not looked at the newspapers or watched the TV News since before Christmas and, as a result, did not not know Britain was being buffeted by gale force winds.
Then again, maybe they did know, but just did not care to look after those who pay for the tickets.