UPDATE 1 (7.40pm): Still no delivery, plus no communication from either BA or Express Baggage at all. I called BA myself and they informed me that now that they’ve handed over my cases to Express Baggage it’s their responsibility. A call to the automated phone number (with no option of speaking to a human) yields nothing further, and I’m still slightly steaming from the tone of voice from the BA chap, who seemed to think that the fact that Express Baggage was experiencing a ‘backlog’ at Manchester Airport was somehow cause for sympathy on my part.
Clearly that 4-8 hour delivery time is pure fiction. It’s now nearly eight and a half hours since Express Baggage picked them up from the airport, so now I have even less of a clue as to where my stuff is….
Some of you may be aware of my delayed return to the UK and my Heathrow Terminal 5-related nightmare of my checked-in cases not making to Manchester at the same time as me.
Seeing as this is the most interesting thing that is happening today, and I am exceedingly bored right now, I thought I’d write a post about it to hopefully summon the rapid arrival of all of my decent clothes (mental note: that whole “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” thing has near universal connotations).
Thanks to the all powerful glory of the internets, British Airways has a nifty tracking page to follow the progress of your damaged, delayed and lost luggage. Having recently been informed that my luggage had been upgraded from ‘lost’ to ‘delayed’, I’d thought I’d try it out. Once you enter the details, you are presented with this:
Personal details artfully removed.
Here we learn that my bags were cleared for delivery at 9pm last night, a good six hours after I made it into Manchester (which itself was about 7 hours after I was supposed to, but that’s a different story). There isn’t really much else to see, other than the swanky colour schemes involved and the fact that Express Baggage collected them this morning at 11.22 am.
For any further details I have to visit Express Baggage’s own website and input my details there, after which we get this page:
I'd forgotten how basic Microsoft Paint actually is....
As you can see there isn’t really that much useful information here, and rather ominously the ‘ETA’ field has been left blank. Gah….
They do, however, give an indication of a possible delivery time quoting 4-8 hours for deliveries 0-50 miles from the airport. Let’s take a look at the distance at stake here (‘A’ being Manchester Airport, and ‘B’ being Blackley, the chunk of Manchester’s metropolitan sprawl that I call home):
View Larger Map
Google Maps gives me a distance of 20.8 miles, which it says is “about 29 mins” by car.
I know I’m not the only person who will have lost luggage in the last 24 hours (in fact at the complaints desk I saw a family with two young girls who seemed more than a little upset that a case containing “all our Christmas pwesents!” hadn’t made it either), so I’m aware I’m not the only stop on their delivery route. However, it is now over four and a half hours since they were picked up and I’m getting increasingly frustrated, not least because I was keen to test-run the new Windows 7 beta at some point today (which is on a USB flashdrive I’d foolishly packed away). That and the fact that I was supposed to be heading to London today.
Ho hum. C’est la vie. I guess I’ll keep you posted….
P.S. I’m aware of the fact that this post is probably of absolutlely no interest to anyone, other than myself, whatsoever. I’m just getting it out of my system….
