My other travelling companion had already arrived under her own steam so was waiting downstairs. I went down in the lift to find her and it was empty down there, and she checked in down there, although, as I have found in the past, no purple BC for you if you checked in on line unlike when you use the drive thru.
Straight through security and I persuaded my fellow travellers to head straight for the Clubhouse to get those treatment appointments done before hitting the duty free. We were in luck, all three of us were booked in for our chosen pamperings.
It's my first time!
I don't know what I did right on this trip, but I had no trouble at all in persuading my cohorts to take a swimming cosie in their carry on for a go in the hot tub.
Weh-hey!
All too soon the 'final' call was made, and they agreed that turning up early is definitely well worth it for the Clubhouse experience. Typical for LHR, it was a case of Final Call My @rse. We stood in line for ten minutes in the 'priority' queue. The economy queue was significantly faster, it was not at all clear why, and we would indeed have been better off in that line.
The neat thing was that neither of my two companions had ever done a long haul premium cabin, so this was a bit of an experience. Plenty of photos being taken. I set the standard by getting changed into PJs while we were still on the ground.
Damn, how do I elbow him?
Lemme out!
We pushed back and took off pretty much on time. Then there was an interminable wait for a pre-lunch drink. The recent reduction in crew is appallingly obvious at this point. We were over an hour into the flight before I placed my drink request, and for a fill up I gave up and went to the bar.
Food wasn't too bad: although I'd said to the crew I didn't mind either of the two non-veggie options (a Thai green curry or sausages and mash), they said no, I'd be OK with whatever I wanted so I went for the curry. Fifteen minutes later, 'Do you mind if we switch you to sausages?' of course, I didn't mind, I guess they are not used to a pax trying to be helpful on a full flight [although I could identify at least half a dozen seats on mates rates].
Despite the wines appearing none too exciting, the Spanish red was superb - I don't have the menu on me, but it was excellent.
One of my companions asked for some crackers late on into the flight twice, but nothing ever arrived (remember the Freedom menu anyone?). Again, evidence of a reduced crew providing a worse service.
Then I spent far too long at the bar chatting with the other pax as they came and went.
Landing was a nightmare. As we were well into finals, maybe 20s to touching down, we had a missed approach and did a go around that lasted almost an hour due to bad weather. The good news was that when we did finally deplane, we were met with a completely emtpy immigration hall. Our bags appeared fairly quickly although there was no sign of priority baggage handling being exercised.
Then we went to try to find our connecting flight to LAS on Virgin America, but that's a whole other story.
In conclusion, not a bad flight, definitely improved by entertaining the newbies. Even better, we were all on free redemption flights courtesy of my FC account.
Cheers, H
