BA and Heathrow terminal 5

This was the first time in the past 10 years that I have traveled through London and through British Airways. I am quite impressed by the service of British Airways and even more impressed by London Heathrow airport.

While all other airlines just give a blanket and headphone, BA gave a bunch more goodies. To start with they gave a night cap and a small toothbrush with one time use paste. They also gave a pair of socks, which I didn’t use at all. The staff of BA was pretty friendly; liquor pretty much flowed in BA. During every meal they offered “white or red wine” if you say no to either of them then the list would continue to beer, whiskey and so on. They were pretty generous in serving the same. For once the airline served real milk with coffee and not the creamer; they were not too generous with sugar though. The food in general was good and appeared rightly rationed because by the time they served the next meal my stomach was ready to receive the same.

Now the Heathrow airport, first of all, the terminal was massive. It appeared the new Bangalore international airport is partly inspired by the Heathrow airport. There were some unique things that I observed in the airport, here are some

• There was a pen shop in the airport and the minimum cost of a pen I saw was 9 pounds (or ~ $18), I chatted up with the shop person and she mentioned the pens are unique as in some are made with silver, gold and platinum and so on. She said she had a pen that would cost around 1000 pounds. I didn’t dare to ask her to show me.
• Unlike US where there are water fountains at the intersection of men and women restrooms, Heathrow had only 2 at terminal 5A one on each end of the terminal.
• Unlike US restrooms where they make it optional to use heated air to dry hands, Heathrow makes it the only option to dry hands.
• The Duty Free shop is the biggest I have seen. Needless to say they had an exquisite collection of liquor and chocolates and everything was extremely expensive.
• There were more people at the airport to help passengers than in US and the people were truly helping the passengers.
• I was quite amazed at their security system too; the bins to put our stuff were loaded on rollers. We had to pick up from the bottom set of rollers and place it on top set of rollers and dump our stuff in. After the security, we pick up our stuff and the bins go down to the bottom rollers back to the beginning.
• The people at the security were very helpful for I noticed that in one of the cases they themselves put the liquid container that one of the passengers carrying into a ziploc bag themselves.