Archives for "Traveling"

If you can’t do it right, just stay away.

UPDATE: I’ve now had a response from Heathrow. See the bottom of this post for details.

On Wednesday I got up at an unholy hour to catch the first flight back to London, keen to capitalise on a full working day. After a few weather related wobbles I landed at Heathrow in good time.

I needn’t have bothered.

My early start was gradually eroded as I waited, and waited and waited for my baggage to arrive, my mood slowly worsened by the stench from the nearby toilets and the awareness that, having waited for close to two hours for my bag in the same spot in late December, I could be in for a very long wait.

I turned to Twitter to vent my frustration:

And then something wonderful happened. They actually tweeted me back:

Imagine my surprise. Well done Heathrow! They care! They listen to customers! They actually realise that it is 2010.

Or do they?

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Warning: this post could be considered to be tedious, but I just wanted to say it.

I recently saw an article in Travel Weekly entitled “Golden age of air travel has ended”. Of course it has – air travel is, quite simply, a pain.

Here are the instructions for flying on an airplane.

1. Travel to airport

Not trivial, and worthy of an entire blog post on its own.

2. QUEUE for Check-in

A few years ago savvy travellers could get around this by checking in on-line. However as most people are now on to this, at most airports on-line check-in just means swapping the very long queue for a slightly less long queue.

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