On Thursday afternoon: I quickly heard about the Gate Gourmet strike and didn't think it would spread to BA staff. I was wrong and on Friday one of the world's busiest airport looked like a refugee camp.
During that whole day I was following the news closely and was hoping that my 20:25 flight would be ok. The end of the strike had been moved from 18h00 to 20h00 which made me a bit nervous. Still decided to go to the airport despite negative press and radio reports of "all flight cancelled, disruption to last days..."
I arrived at LHR Terminal 1 and saw dozens of BA staff outside the terminal building asking every passenger where they are travelling to, what to do if delayed/cancelled...
BA told me that I should for the time being wait in the tents they had put in the car park as my flight was 1h30 hours delayed but so far they were confident it would be leaving LHR. I was told not to go to the check-in area as the airport was overcrowded. I was not too stressed and was guided towards the tent where I could collect my food for my flight as I was told there would only be water and tea on-board. In the tent I overheard people's different stories including those who spent the night on the tent's hard floor whilst waiting for their connecting flight! The tent had blankets and bottled water, this is when I realised LHR T1 looked more like a refugee camp than an airport.
I finally was told I could enter the terminal building to check-in as for now they were 90% sure we would be taking off. From the picture above you can see a line that stretched about 500m in the terminal building for people waiting to negotiate a refund or to see if there was space on another airline or BA flight. I normally use the self-service check-in but all these were switched off (as was the online check in that day) and was guided towards a check-in area that had a mixture of people flying long-haul to Tokyo, San Francisco as well as European destinations. It was crazy as people for the long-haul flights were obviously taking longer to check-in with their huge bags and people like me were just trying to get a boarding pass for hand luggage. I saw lot's of people shouting to staff and people sleeping on the floor!
Finally made it to my plane and when the aircraft left the LHR tarmac towards Budapest I could fully relax even though we departed late! A lot of people I saw are angry with BA and with the recent often harsh press coverage, BA's reputation will most definitely suffer for the month's to come!
or not 
then i could get a "free" flight to Dubai or even Hong Kong free !
