A day at Heathrow Airport

We were up early this morning and got to the airport in good time for our 9.15am flight to Zurich. We had checked in online the night before but when we got to the counter to drop our bags we found that BA had overbooked the flight and so we had no seats, despite our confirmation of them the night before. As Gavin is such a loyal and frequent flier with BA he has been awarded a gold card for life and gets all sorts of privileges, so it was very embarrassing for BA that such a 'valued client' was bumped off the flight. To be fair they tried their best to remedy the situation and managed to get us on a flight 3 hours later (which was also overbooked but they just bumped some other poor sods off that flight). Gavin was relatively calm about it but as I was very tired I kicked off  and did not accept their futile apologies. Then going through 'fast track' at security was a 30 minute slow process with some poor woman checking every single on-flight cabin suitcase belonging to the passengers - their contents being spilled out onto the counter while she checked, for all to see everyone's underwear and other items of a personal nature that had been packed. Again I had a sense of humour failure, especially when the stupid staff member said 'don't worry, you will feel much better about it when you get through security and can have a coffee.' No I won't....

Adams friends flew from City Airport and so instead of the early start and an afternoon of skiing as they had planned, we sat around Heathrow wasting time while they are sitting around at Zurich airport waiting for us. This has been the worst situation we have ever encountered at Heathrow. They did compensate us financially but as Gavin said, we don't want money we just want to get to our destination and give our guests the holiday they were expecting. I was so fed up I found myself in the Fortnum and Mason store at the airport and treated myself to a box of rose and violet chocolates with some of the compensation money.

We have already checked and our return flight is the same story, BA have over booked the flights again but because this experience has been flagged up on Gavin's account it 'is unlikely that we will get bumped off the flight again'. 

We finally arrived at 6.30pm tonight, the shops are now shut and we won't be able to buy groceries until Monday morning. A very frustrating day!

 So the blip is of Heathrow Airport as that is all I have seen today.