https://cheerful-experimenter-3211.ck.page/dea2dfa94b/index.js%22%3E%3C/script

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

What’s a Travel Day Without Glitches?



Boring? Delightful? Unheard of?

We fly from Seattle to London Heathrow to Rome on British Airways tonight.

We first flew from Bellingham to Seattle on Alaska, a flight that we’d purchased separately when the price dropped.

That flight departed nearly an hour late because of some computer display problem. That still gave us plenty of time to connect to our 6:50pm  flight.

There’s one more catch. As with many flights to foreign countries, BA won't allow us to check in online. They want to look at our passports (possibly also checking to see if we have the new ETA we recently discussed) before issuing our boarding passes.

Before we left home, Brian asked in the FlyerTalk BA forum if the SEA BA lounge could issue boarding passes. The answer was prompt: BA's SEA lounge is currently "closed for refurbishment." 

Someone else suggested checking with the gate agents where BA was boarding its earlier flight that departs around 1:30pm. Unfortunately our landing is about an hour later.

The result is a trek outside security to the BA counter. We also considered the possibility of asking for our boarding passes at our departure gate, but we honestly don’t know if BA would allow that.

By the time we landed, we figured it made sense to go directly to the BA counter, located at the far end of the airline check-in concourse and a healthy walk.

We arrived with great timing just as the counter was opening.



There were few people in line and we got our boarding passes without much delay. We asked the counter agent if she could see our ETA and she indicated she couldn’t. It appears to be running on an honor system as far as BA goes. Odd…

We zipped through a TSA PreCheck line and hiked back to the Alaska Airlines C Concourse Lounge, where we’re relaxing before taking a train or two to the South Gates where BA parks.

Somehow that short BLI-SEA flight experience has already made our travel day much longer.

We next have a nearly ten-hour flight to Heathrow, with a comfortable four hours there to connect to our onward flight to Rome. We’re scheduled to land there around 7:30pm local time, nine hours ahead of our Pacific time zone.

We’re staying at a Hilton Garden Inn that’s supposedly a short shuttle ride from the airport.

So far so good.





No comments: