My wife and I had been booked to travel on BA from Edinburgh to Madrid via Birmingham, but 24 hours before departure BA phoned to say that the flight was cancelled, but they could offer us outward flights via Heathrow with the LHR-Madrid leg on Iberia who code-share with BA. Homeward would still be BA via Birmingham. I accepted that offer.
At Heathrow this necessitated the inconvenience of changing terminals, and we then found that our Iberia flight was delayed - no accurate timings or reasons given, not even after the very late take-off. At this point we discovered that Iberia, unlike BA, did not offer standard catering, only a pay-only trolley. If BA had bothered to warn us we could have bought sandwiches etc. at Heathrow, but we had not been told anything. The catering trolley was manned by the two stewardesses from hell who simply could not cope with demand and had decided to cope with the inadequacy by randomly selecting a few passengers here and there to whom they would offer to sell food, and studiously ignoring everyone else, despite frantic waving from many passengers and call buttons being pressed. Some were even getting out of their seats and standing over the stewardesses demanding service - if I had an aisle seat I might have been tempted to do likewise, but couldn't because the cabin was so cramped. Eventually we gave up and arrived at Madrid pretty hungry and thirsty.
The on-board PA system was very poor audio quality so that the rather fragmented English of the very sparse announcements was largely unintelligible.
After arrival we found that neither of our suitcases had appeared on the carousel - a large queue forming at the missing luggage counter showed that we were not alone. Eventually one of the two cases turned up on the carousel of a different flight, the second was delivered to our hotel a day later. The missing luggage counter was very slow and the staff very offhand with us.
I complained to BA on my return (the all-BA service homeward via Birmingham went without hitch) and they both apologised and added 10,000 BA miles to each of our BA Executive cards.
I defintely wish never to experience Iberia again.
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HI there, sounds like you had a bad time with Iberia, I'm very interested in aviation, so I am disappointed that a legacy carrier had such problems, I rated your review as very helpful because of my interest in aviation. I also think that one bad experience is enough to put you off an airline or anything else for that matter. I had a bad experience with BA and won't fly them again.
koshkha 17.03.2007 17:42
This is really just a rant about your bad experience rather than a review of a long-established airline. I hardly think you can blame Iberia for BA's cancellation and some of the problems that followed from that. To me one single flight on an airline isn't enough to make a good assessment.
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danieletheridge 18.12.2000 (28.04.2001)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Iberia - IBE
Mar 17th, 2007
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