Has air travel gotten worse since covid? I certainly think so. It’s been a while since I’ve gone on a long trip, and today was without a doubt the worst experience I’ve had in decades. Normally I’d keep my rant to myself, but one of my goals for this trip is to write more, so the tale of how we got to Japan seems like a good place to start.
TFL was the first hurdle to overcome. That’s not a new thing though, they’re always pretty unreliable. It turns out that there was maintenance work being done on all the train lines that could connect us to our London City Airport flight, so our options were to either take several rail replacement buses and do multiple tube transfers in London, or take an Uber. Uber it is. As we were driving to the airport I definitely noticed the thick fog, but it was not something I could do anything about.
Let’s talk about flight check-in post-covid. British Airways’ method is horrendous. They ‘partnered’ with an app called Verifly, and it just did not work. Verifly is not up to date with the latest covid requirements for each country, and the verification result never seems to make it back to BA, meaning that we could not check in online and pick any seats for our long haul flight, at least not without paying BA more money.
Despite our online check-in woes the check-in at the airport went fairly smoothly and we dropped our bags off as soon as the bag drop opened. It was at the security gate where our troubles began. It didn’t let us through. Seconds later a guy came up and told us our flight was cancelled. We rushed back downstairs to the BA service desk to get ourselves rebooked, but there was already a hefty queue in front of us, and BA’s customer service desk at LCY isn’t the most populously staffed. When it was finally our turn the only replacement flight on the same day departed from Heathrow, in about 4 hours. Having no other option, we took it. The guy at the desk assured us that we could make it if we took public transport and left immediately, which should be doable given that he assured us all the bags we checked in were already waiting for us.
That turned out not to be true, and we had to wait a while to get our final suitcase back. What follows could be described as a “mad rush through London” but was in fact a quiet taxi ride to Paddington where we took the Heathrow Express (yes, I know.. but we were in a hurry and I fully intend to get this reimbursed from BA). We ended up taking a taxi because public transport seemed iffy according to the TFL site at the time (what a surprise) and the Uber didn’t show up in time. It turned out to be a good choice because the taxi driver said we’d be better off driving to Paddington and taking the train rather than driving all the way to Heathrow, given the weather and road conditions. We ended up at Heathrow with about two and a half hours to spare. We never did find out if the original flight was cancelled because of the thick fog or because of something else.
Our original flight would have had us transfer at Frankfurt and onwards to Tokyo Narita airport, our replacement flight would take us to Tokyo Haneda via Hong Kong, arriving only a couple of hours later than originally planned. At least, if we could make it on to the flight in time. We got to Heathrow with a reasonable amount of time left, but when trying to check in with the machines all we got was a piece of paper that said “Request assistance”. Despite it being BA’s main terminal at Heathrow, the general check-in area was woefully understaffed and handling of each person in the queue took forever. We were still very far back in the queue when I realized that we wouldn’t make our flight, and asked for assistance to a random BA member of staff, who saved us by bumping us up in the queue. The person who checked us in seemed to indicate that the reason we needed assistance checking was again that the covid certificate from Verifly wasn’t logged in their system. Once again, Verifly + BA just does not work.
Despite all the setbacks we managed to get checked in for the Hong Kong flight and headed through security. While doing that I was fortunately able to cancel our first night’s hotel at Narita free of charge, since our new flight would take us to Haneda instead. We got to the gate with minutes to spare and even had time to pick up some food, so I was pretty happy. Surely that was the last of our problems.
Hah, no. After we boarded the plane it sat at the gate for two full hours, apparently because some of BA’s crew members had to come in at the last minute and they had to get paper(!) approval from the Hong Kong authorities before they were allowed to board the flight. So by the time the flight finally left Heathrow I already knew we missed our connecting flight, which departed about two and a half hours later from Hong Kong.
This opened up a whole new world of trouble. We were supposed to just transfer at HK so we wouldn’t need to worry abouy any additionala covid restrictions that would have been required if you went landside. My assumption while flying was that they’d get us a replacement flight that’d be reasonably close to the original flight, so we could still sort it out at the transfer desk without going landside, but as soon as we got out of the plane a person from the airline was there waiting for us to guide us through the airport to get us landside. BA did get us onto a replacement flight already, which was nice, but it was about 6 hours later, which was not nice, because that meant we had to go landside to pick up our luggage and check in from there. And that meant that we had to do a covid test and sign all the documentation needed to enter Hong Kong. We passed through a whole area of sterile covid test cubicles, all fully staffed, but no passengers in sight other than the two of us and one other person who missed his connection. I’m not sure if that’s just a matter of timing and being between flight arrivals, or if just not a lot of people go to Hong Kong any more given the covid situation there. I suspect the latter but I can’t know for sure.
After going through all that we picked up our luggage and our guide brought us to the departures area, where we had a long wait for our final flight. British Airways kindly provided us a lunch coupon for our troubles, but our guide warned us it might not be valid since BA didn’t renew their contract with the airport vendors. This turned out not to be an issue because all the shops were closed anyway.
From there on it was finally smooth sailing all the way. The Japan Airlines flight was excellent as always, and we didn’t have any issue going through immigration and customs at the Japan side. Though it wasn’t clear to me that the Japanese covid site’s “quarantine pre-screening” part was required for the ‘normal’ arrival process to happen, given that we only required proof of vaccination. We managed to finish it before arrival though, and basically just walked through by the time we got to Narita – Yes, our replacement replacement flight took us back to Narita instead of Haneda. I had already cancelled the hotel, but that was fine though since we ended up arriving the next day’s morning instead.
We made it to Japan! It’s been a couple of years, but it feels like forever.