#908306 by Hamster
08 Aug 2015, 17:49
Previous TR: JFK-MIA

After dropping off the rental car at the CRC and heading to the main airport on the MIA-Mover, we made the LONG walk down to the US-Airways desks. There was no queue for First check in and were quickly seen to by a miserable agent. This agent was actually the check-in manager and he refused to check our bags onto our (separate ticket) connecting BA flight in Boston, saying “we don’t do that”.

A bit miffed we headed through security quite quickly (again was a massive walk to the correct section!); we first headed to the larger of the AA lounges at MIA and had some drinks, and tried to connect to the poor Wi-Fi. After a short stay we made our way to the BA/AA Premium Lounge that is for long haul international travellers, but our BA Silver cards gained us access. This is a much nicer lounge, it’s the one AA and BA use for Business and First (until BA open their own lounge). It has a buffet and self pour bar. And as we arrive just after it opened, it was very quiet. While we were passing the time we phoned US airways who confirmed that the check in agent should of tagged our bags all the way through to London and we could ask for this to be done during our lay-over in Charlotte.

We headed down to the gate at around 14:15 (scheduled departure time was 14:59) and boarding was in operation and priority boarding was working well, once you manage to get past the large queue for normal boarding that is! Once boarded that was a full bar, pre-take of, beverage service from the friendly crew. The male occupant of 1F was SHOUTING down his phone, while it was on loudspeaker, he was getting many comments and glares from a few people until the crew member informed him that he was on speakerphone, to which he replied he had a new phone and didn’t know how to turn it off & just continued his conversation. The crew then asked the entire First Class cabin quite loudly if anyone knew how to turn speakerphone off on an iPhone 6+. This soon got the male to finish his call about multi million dollar houses and yachts!

The whole plane had soon fully boarded but they weren’t closing the door. At first not much was said to the passengers but eventually the Pilot made an announcement that there was a faulty gauge of some kind (I can’t remember!) and they were waiting for an engineer to come do a manual test before we could depart. After a few drinks, and the crew trying to find out if people would make their connections, we were starting to worry about our connection on to our BOS-LHR flight that had quite a tight connection to start with! We eventually departed at 15:51, 52 minutes late :-s!

Once in the air we hoped that we would make up some time in the air and at Charlotte, as the same aircraft was flying the next segment we knew we wouldn’t miss it!

As this was a short flight, all that is offered in First is drinks and a ‘Snack Basket’, but the crew were trying there hardest for everyone to take as much as they liked, so I had quite a few of the ‘Milano’ cookies and some crisps. And they were very nice, along with a few gin and tonics.

Soon it was time for landing and we got to the gate at 17:59, 53 minutes late! We then headed to the lounge to see if we could get our luggage problem sorted.

In the lounge we asked about our luggage and if they could re-tag it to London and the agent came out with the same line about how they don’t check through on separate tickets. After informing him that we had spoken to customer services and they said that it should have been done, he grunted and said he would send a message to the baggage team to try and get the re-tagged. We didn’t hold our breath but didn’t think it was worth the stress in taking it any further and just had our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t get put on the luggage belt at BOS.

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