I’d been told that the lesser spotted flight upgrade does happen. But despite travelling the Heathrow to San Francisco route on British Airways roughly once every three months for the best part of four years, despite knowing at least three members of the BA cabin crew who put me down on the upgrade list (but no promises, it’s at the discretion of the Captain you know) and despite frequently travelling with a colleague whose best friend is not only a pilot but a BA pilot, the elusive upgrade had never happened. Until today.
So what have I learnt from the experience? Firstly that Club World on BA is very, very, nice. Now nice is a much abused and cliched word but Club World is the sort of nice that makes me ponder what the rarified heights of First Class are like; nice staff, nice food, nice wine (Cline Cellars “Ancient Vines” 2007 Zinfandel plus three other red choices and four white choices if you’re interested), just … nice. Secondly that the seats (which put themselves into all sorts of configurations, from bolt upright to totally flat on your back and all points in between, at the touch of a button) are a world apart from the BA World Traveller Plus seats (AKA premium economy) that I’m used to.
But first and foremost, the lesson I’ve learnt is that Club World seats have power sockets. Proper power sockets. Power sockets that actually charge a laptop. Not an airline seat power outlet that needs a special adaptor, but a proper, plug it in, power socket. Which for some reason takes US power adaptors not UK. This could have meant disaster; good as the battery life is on my MacBook Pro it’s not up to some 9 and a half hours of usage including PowerPoint deck wrangling and watching a movie or two. But luckily the day was saved by a nice lady in a BA uniform who rummaged in her personal luggage (which isn’t a euphemism by the way) and loaned me her own UK/US adaptor for the duration of the flight. Now that’s service in my book.
But mental note to self … upgrades do happen so sticking a US power adaptor in your hand baggage next time is probably a good idea.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
- At The Airport, Not All QR Codes Are Created Equal
Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and...
- Flight Safe Mode
As part of the security and safety announcement that gets made each time you get onto a plane these days, there’s invariably a bit which goes something like this …...
- Flight Safe Mode; The Sequel
This is mercifully brief follow up to my previous post on British Airways proscriptions on enabling flight safe mode on your mobile phone and hails jointly from the departments of...
