Terminal 5 continues to displease

Nineteen days after Jackie Doody boarded a British Airways flight from London to Bahrain, her bags arrived.

Ms. Doody, however, had already returned home ten days earlier.

Ms. Doody left the Uk on March 28th for a brief holiday break. On April 5th, when her bags still hadn’t arrived, Ms. Doody was scheduled to return home. She notified the airline that she would no longer be in Bahrain. Baggage handlers, however, telephoned to tell her that her bags were being delivered in the Middle East.

Ms. Doody is just one of many passengers still facing problems when flying through Heathrow Terminal 5. In fact, British Airways is not scheduled to fly to Bahrain from T5 until June, but many passengers still have to transit through the Terminal in order to catch connecting flights. In Ms. Doody’s case, she had to transfer through the terminal in order to get home to Edinburgh.

“It is getting increasingly irritating and the lack of information is frustrating,” Ms Doody said. “Then when there is information, it is inaccurate and not given out.”
She explained, “The form I originally filled out gave the Bahrain address, but I asked BA to update it as soon as I returned exactly so I could avoid this happening.”

A passenger service agent at Bahrain International Airport, Mohammed Ali, said that Ms. Doody’s case was all too common and said that the bags would be on their way back to Ms. Doody as soon as possible.

“We have had many cases of lost bags because of the Heathrow Terminal 5 problems,” he said. “Maybe two or three cases a day since it happened. They all get the bags eventually, but it will take some time to send them back to Edinburgh.”

Although she received an apology from a BA spokesperson, Ms. Doody said she would be avoiding T5 in the future.

“I will seriously consider avoiding Terminal 5 from now on,” she said. “It’s not just the lost bags, it’s all the time I’ve wasted over it. I’ve had to fill out all sorts of forms and been on the phone with BA several times. My insurance company wanted a full list of what was in the bags with receipts, but seeing as it was so long ago now I could hardly remember.”