Originally Posted by
BEagle
"The most stupid statement I ever heard came from Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways. A day before Heathrow’s fiasco opened he stood there on TV and announced terminal 5 would be up and running smoothly from day one and no British Airways customers would ever have more than two people in front of them at the check-in desk.
Came through T5 this morning and have to advise Willie that he is grossly misinformed, there are no check-in desks at all.
There's Fast Bag Drop (haha), there's Visa Check, there's Assistance, there's Customer Service (which everyone else would call ticketing) but not one check-in desk.
There are lots of check-in machines. These take as identity locator reference, machine-readable passport or credit card. They don't of course read Russian passports, they don't of course read read Russian credit cards. The locator code is buried down in the text of BA tickets issues in Russia (if I didn't know the format I would have been screwed too). My Russian fellow traveller would have been sunk without me there. There is no Russian language option, despite 4 flights a day to Russia.
Spoke to the agent on duty at the machines (had to approach her as she viewed our confusion from a distance) and was told "probably" customer service could help. This despite the fact we are standing in front of the machine holding a ticket with the locator printed on it.
On to Fast Bag Drop. This should be a 10-second operation, surely ? One desk was into a phone call, another was scrutinising passports for something, a third was reallocating seats, presumably after a machine had not allocated the desired ones ! Excuse me, but this is nothing to do with dropping bags, fast or not.
Does nobody at BA have a CLUE about how to go about systems design anywhere in the organisation.