To expect British Airways to sit me next to my breastfed baby's basinette on a 27 hour flight?

[TheToadLessTravelled]

Looking for advice from more seasoned travellers.

Booked for a 27 hour flight with DH and 11mo DS tomorrow.
Had booked to all sit together but British Airways lost/changed the seat allocation somehow and we have ended up with DH near the basinette and me where I could not even see the baby.

BA have been really unhelpful and I am really stressing about the flight now.

Three calls to BA have given three different stories about whether/how we can be moved but we are still not together although at least I can see DS from where I now am moved to several rows back.

The last agent said all bulkhead seats are now allocated and all cot positions booked on the whole flight in all classes which I thought would be unlikely.
Also told me there are no flights close to that time I can switch to.
Also told I cannot switch seats with DH so I have the cot position seat.

DS is tall and wriggly so even if me and DH swap seats so I can BF on takeoff the person next to me is going to have kicking feet in their lap. I don't want to be a total pain to other passengers but us sitting apart is going to mean a lot of getting up and down, shouting out etc I can just see it going wrong.

Any advice on how to get this resolved?
Not sure what else I can do

Oh good! Lovely lady must be on mumsnet

Glad it got sorted, I thought BA were shocking the one and only time I flew long haul with kids. However just wanted to second the Air NZ vote, I have flown to NZ 7 times with kids with them and they beat any other airline on the route hands down. I go down via Hong Kong and back via LA as you save about 2 hours each direction with the tail winds.

Good luck for your flight OP!

ihearttc
Will PM you.

having recently done this flight with my 20 month old can I recommend you buy one of those mini bean bag pillows. He was too big for the basinette so slept on me most of the time. That pillow made him sleeping on me (half on me half on the pillow) so much more comfortable for both of us. I know this is probably a little late but you may want to consider for the flight home.

Also on the outbound flight we were so worried about how everyone else on the flight was coping (with our baby) we got quite stressed. on the flight home we were just like bugger everyone else and we were much more relaxed (=much more relaxed baby). Good luck I hope everything goes ok, its a bitch of a flight (and to think i used to moan about doing it without kids! right now that would be heaven!).

Thanks macygracy for the advice we may try and fly back AirNZ if we can cancel our BA tickets. We have been told that we have seats together on the return flight but frankly I don't trust BA any more and would prefer not to fly with them again.

The ticketing rules and procedures have shown themselves to be totally unfamily friendly and it's just not worth risking 27hours sat apart when really we found we needed two of us together.

That said if we had better seats it might have been doable. DH had been given a window seat with baby not even facing him or able to see him, and not enough leg room due to bassinet to get out without getting two people to move. It was just that row that was so cramped. Couldn't even get the tv screen up so no wonder the lady was happy to move, long trip without any entertainment!

I am a bit shocked that noone has mentioned phenergan. If I hear the words babies, toddlers and plane the first thing that pops into my head is phenergan
speaks from experience

\\_
ooooo \ ooo L

\ /
/

What is phenergan?

It's a travel sickness drug that makes children drowsy, OP - I really wouldn't recommend it at all.

I'm shocked BA were so rubbish, we have always found them really good when ours were tiny.

My (US) paediatrician recommended phenergan to me and I found just a little bit really helped my DC's to fall asleep. I know it doesn't work for everyone and it was a good few years ago that I used it so I don't know what the current medical opinion of it is. It depends how easily your DC's can fall asleep I suppose.
I used to fly longhaul with my 3 DC without my DH very regularly since they were babies. The most daunting was an 11 hour transatlantic flight with a 3 month old, a two year old and a three year old by myself. I always found BA and Virgin to be very good. I used to get a bit stressed before the flights but they always seemed to be trouble free. It obviously got a lot easier as the DC's got older but generally, I never had any problems apart from a bit of air sickness now and then. It is suprising because at other times they could be quite boisterous but they were always faily mellow when we were flying.

Will Backinthebox come back on this thread to comment? It seemed an unnecessarily stressful way to treat you OP.

I am going to follow up with BA this week as the staff had indicated that the ticketing rules were responsible for the situation and I find that unbelievable.

Why would you have rules that give someone who checked themselves into a bulkhead seat just for legroom priority over families needing to travel together? It just seems absurd and unnecessarily stressful what we went through and it seems hard to believe that these are their rules.

That said I had no luck with customer relations helpline, or the main phone number, or emailing them so I have no idea how one actually gets BA to discuss a complaint.

Anyone managed to get a response from BA? Let me know how!

Does anyone know the phone number or email for the Chairman's office? Kicking up a stink at the highest possible level is often effective. Its unbelievably stupid. If they are going to have rules about seating, surely somewhere near the top should be 'babies and young children must be seated with at least one parent/guardian, of the parents' choice.'

But Grimma, the baby was seated with the DH. I'm not sure why BA wouldn't let the seats be officially switched, perhaps because it was less than 24 hours to go or something, but there would have been no problem in practice with OP and her DH switching.

Essentially there was some kind of change in the first place (perhaps because of a change of plane meaning a different number of bassinet positions were available) and by the time it was noticed, other people had booked those seats and quite possibly paid extra to do so. It was then hard for BA to move them.

They do cover themselves on their website by saying they won't be able to guarantee the bassinet positions and perhaps once the distribution was done, there was one remaining bassinet position and seat which went to OP's DC and accompanying adult. As the flight was completely full, BA had less flexibility than normal to make changes. I really don't know that any other airline wouldn't be the same under the same conditions.

OP you could try BA on Facebook or Twitter?

Yep we tried BA on Facebook and Twitter but no response apart from a standard format reply on twitter.

I find it shocking that it is so hard to get then to address the issue. Which is why I will be calling them today to see if we can cancel the flight and book on AirNZ instead .

Cannot face going through this again!

Toad when is your flight back? If you are currently showing as sitting together you might be better to stay as you are than risk Air NZ being full?

My issue is that we were showing as sitting together when I booked the flight we have just taken. Who is to say we would not get moved again

I will try and get a sky couch held on AirNZ before we cancel the BA ticket so that if we have to we can use the BA ticket if they are full.

This is the email address showing for the CEO of BA, Keith Williams - [email protected]

The standard cust rel email , generally has an I am sorry and then totally ignores your complaint and then gives you phone numbers of the offices. I once printed off my email , as gota crap reply posted it and got an email reply 21 days after my posting with a ?100 voucher and a proper apology... It was a genuine complaint as yours is.....but a short haul flight. Don't give up....

I put in a comment / complaint about BA saying I would get my stroller, yet sending it on to my final destination, leaving me with a five hour stopover, a 10 week old and no stroller. I was told it could take 28 days for a response. It has been 21, I am still waiting.

But Grimma, the baby was seated with the DH
who is doubtless a fine father, but not much good when if an ascending baby needs suckling. From what the OP has said, they didn't just let them simply swap places. That's why I said 'of the parents' choice' - we all know which parent our child needs most (in my DDs case, when scared of flying it had to be dad).

They didn't used to charge extra for those bulkhead positions, they used to allocate those seats based on need. A decent airline would still do the latter, even if it meant refunding legroom charges

Hi grimma yes I don't know why they couldn't change the boarding passes but practically speaking the OP and DH would have been able to swap whatever the reason.

I do think the OP was given poor info as the person on the phone could have said that although the boarding passes couldn't change, they could swap seats with each other.

And yes they didnt used to charge extra but flying has become much more competitive so it isn't surprising they do now. I expect BA are not the only "mainstream" airline to do so.

This sounds like the sort of story the Daily Fail might like to cover... just sayin, like...

:o

They didn't used to charge extra for those bulkhead positions

IME, BA still don't. They charge you to prebook your seat allocation, not for the bulkhead seats per se. In fact, I was unable to prebook the bulkhead seats until I got to online check in 24 hours before departure - I had paid to reserve 4 different seats and simply changed them to bulkhead ones on check in.