#922891 by JasonLewis
16 Jun 2016, 21:25
As usual, BA offers a Business Class/Club Europe that isn't really a business class, save for the free booze . . .

That said, the Club Europe Lounge at LIN has it hands down over those at LHR, and was a perfectly wonderful place to relax in prior to our departure. At the gate, things were "odd" to say the least. The one person at the gate must have been practicing her Mussolini impersonation, because despite the signage that posts the order of priority boarding, she refused to let the Club Europe passengers board until some 2/3 of the other passengers had. (What the heck?) And even then, she made us stand in a separate line, and used a separate computer terminal to check us in.

Once onboard, everything was fine. In-flight crew was friendly, the food marginally better leaving Italy than heading towards it (or, at least, it smelled significantly better!).

Arriving on time, I had to ask one of the flight attendants if they had a "fast pass" for us to clear Customs, as we're not UK/EU citizens. Armed with that, getting through Border Force was still time-consuming as they were hassling some soccer/football player to make sure he had a contract before letting him in the UK . . . when they got to us, we told the agent that we had a flight out in the morning, showed him our Virgin Atlantic boarding pass for out flight to JFK, and he allowed us to enter only after placing a special stamp in our US passports that allowed us to stay in-country 15 days (not 6 months) and guaranteed we were INELIGIBLE for any UK gov't services. (Again, what the heck???)

On the one hand, who cares? We were flying out at 9 the next morning. On the other hand, we didn't get such a stamp two weeks earlier when we arrived via Virgin Atlantic and only had a four-hour layover before flying out to Italy. Who knows . . . .

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