Unfortunately for my return journey, the Portugese air traffic controllers were striking – they do it well with rolling 2 hour blocks of striking. This meant that my flight back to LHR was delayed by about 1.5 hours. However, I didn’t know the exact delay so I had to head out to the airport for the normal time. There was no special offer for the upgrade online, well unless you call £450 a special offer. I asked at the airport, but was told that Club was full, but things may change is what they said.
Headed through security and via duty free to pick up some Mateus Rose (yes I did – special offer of discount on box with 2 one litre bottles!). Then over to the lounge that BA use. In the past this was the Air France lounge, which was ok but the staff were unfriendly. The new one is the Blue Lounge, which is a general airport lounge. It was really disappointing – small, crowded, unclean toilets, unhelpful staff and limited beverages (all with corks in and no corkscrew in sight!). For some reason they had put the red wine in the fridge, whereas the white wine was on the side and therefore warm – slightly bizarre! I took a can of soft drink out, but several fell out. I put them back roughly, but not in the correct place as one of the staff tutted behind me and said “I suppose I’ll have to do it if you can’t do it properly!”. Too much time to spend in here – all in all I was in there for nearly three hours and not once were the toilets cleaned. The pile of used hand tissues kept on growing and growing! Whilst the Air France lounge at Lisbon was small, it was only used for BA and AF so that whilst it was small, there was always seats available. And the quality of food and drinks was much better than the Blue Lounge and it had clean toilets!! Unfortunately the Air France lounge is no more - it has been removed as part of the rebuild of the airport.
Anyway, I was checking on line to see if there were seats available in Club and suddenly there were. I asked the staff in the lounge to contact the BA ticket desk for me, to which the response was “why do you want to move as you already have a seat!” - anyway eventually they said there were seats available, but that I had to go back through to departures. I headed off to the ticket desk and upgraded myself for the sum of £115 – not too bad. They said now I could use the lounge – not realising I was silver – I made some joke about the state of it, to which they admitted that everyone complained about the lounge! The seats had come up due to the air traffic controller strikes, and having to re-route people with ex-LHR long-haul flights via Paris to make connections. The only annoying thing was that I had to check my bag in as it now contained liquids.
Eventually the flight came up us boarding, and it was a trundle off through the airport – the gate is a long way from the lounge. There was a big queue around the gate, and boarding was slightly priority orientated, but it was down to buses and then a long trip around the airport to the waiting plane which was still being cleaned. Once on board, settled into my seat and waited for all the buses to come so that we were ready to go.
The flight itself was pretty good – I don’t remember exactly what it was as it was a while ago now. However, it was washed down with some nice bubbles and I caught up on some TV on my iPad on the way home. We landed about 1 hr 15 min late, and then it was the usual bus back to the terminal. Luckily this time, I was in Club and therefore I had the benefit of being in the first bus without the EuroTraveller passengers. Immigration was quiet, and luckily the bags were came off fairly soon after I arrived at the baggage belt. Nothing broken inside, so I could enjoy the mateus rose when I got home!!
The flight was fine, the main issue was the lounge – absolutely appalling and really not worth going in! I wrote to BA to point out how bad it was and how it reflected on BA – got some free Avois points which are always gratefully received, but it would have been nice to have had a better lounge to wait in.
