ORD-LHR. a christmas ohare T3, something i have flown through a lot in the past but not visited in some time.
there is now an admiral's lounge and flagship furst lounge here. the admiral's lounge is much better than it used to be. first is more limited to get in. note neither is included for flying domestic first class. these day's the easier way to access the admiral's lounge is with an AA cobranded card. the receptionist/agent was surprised i had different access than the woman they thought i was traveling with and found this confusing - i found it confusing because they thought i was traveling with someone. this same woman (3 agents staffing too) had checked someone in 5 minutes earlier to the other lounge, with the same (uncommon) last name as mine. i tried finding her on facebook and. linkedin to send a message and say hi, although didn't track her down and none of my fam were familiar with her. so the mystery connect never happened.
this is some of the dining stuff. i was surprised they didn't have their own serviced dining area - although i've been to one of these at JFK before that didn't so i should have known that. the united equivalent (polaris) does have a serviced area, i have some pics in another thread of it. got these and head over to T5 since that is where BA actually flies out of.
i got to T5 with an airside (past security) shuttle bus. it can take a while with traffic apparently (first time for me) but it was pretty quick. T5 looked nice and updated, my understanding is there is not a ton of lounge space available at all there period but BA does have a lounge there. i didn't see the regular part as there is a serviced dining area for first class, and after i was done eating, the flight was boarding. there were 2 of us flying (new year's eve flight) but just me here; there were 2 flight attendants for us in the cabin and they popped in to say hi while i was eating as well.
'shrimp & avocado with grapefruit and microgreens'
salmon with lobster nage
cheesecake
our bird, and an easier to capture french bird next to us
maybe the first row would be better as the 2 windows are closer to you, i had to lean out to use mine better. seat narrows but not as much as many others out there, and i actually found this to be one of the most comfortable plane beds i've had.
my understanding is economy seats cost ~$2000 and business/first seats range from $70k to $100k. wild to think they are spending that much on these things. designed to last 30 years but usually get retrofit out every 10.
the female flight attendant was a big fan of me drinking all their champagne, felt kinda dehydrated at some point later though lol.
lots of room, tv flips out. kind of a weird design i think as it didn't seem to have a hard affixed spot out, not that it was flopping all over while i watched anything though.
first class BA gift, not really sure what to do with it for myself but took it anyway. would have been nicer if i had first on the way to my p's
canapes
sliced ribeye steak starter
traditional christmas dinner (turkey)
chocolate walnut souffle
they made up the bed for me. i got jammies too. didn't keep them. i have kept the oman air and air india pajamas from prior flights, one of the few good things from air india. low light here but bed was quite good.
for breakfast i just had the ricotta and truffle omelette. no starters but probably should have tried them. just had OJ. not really a fan of transportation or airline breakfasts, but i'm about to have a bunch unfortunately. omelette was a bit dry.
although i was business out, my arrival in first allowed for access to the concorde room at LHR. this is british airway's most exclusive lounge. mostly just international first class.
the balcony part has a nice view of planes on the tarmac, and the tip of one of the concordes.
it has dining i was looking forward to.
unfortunately, it's early, so i'm in for another breakfast. i decided to try the full english - i figured what better place to have a traditional english breakfast than the concorde room at LHR? in reality, it was pretty disappointing. i've had much better on my small thai island. i didn't find anything particularly enjoyable outside of the bacon and tomato. it had black pudding, which i never tried before.... it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. the problem was it wasn't overall very good, so it feels like i'd owe black pudding another try elsewhere. although i'm certainly not going to go out of my way to order it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding
onto my next flight, an a321 neo in "club europe" - which is business class. unfortunately in europe this typically means they just block the middle seat and. you get economy seats. these are not even 'main cabin extra' type economy seats with greater seat pitch/legroom - they are just straight up economy. not only that, they are 29-30" - you'll find even most asian carriers on the same. plane run 30-32" - leaning towards usually having the latter. so yeah, the seats suck, for 5.5 hours LHR-CAI.
fun how the short chick who got in front of me hopped in and immediately reclined. no on board entertainment system. wifi, but it wasn't free, even for biz. was 15 GBP for the flight i think? i paid for it so i could entertain myself somehow.
thankfully i had no aisle seatmate. this actually ended up being pretty not terrible since i could lay down. super legit, would be totally worth paying for this. air new zealand actually has something like this now where you can buy the row and make an "air couch" which has additional equipment on the seat to make more of a bed.
another breakfast, a full english again. was not too enjoyable, the eggs were particularly sad.
in cairo i needed a guy to manually bring me through the transfer desk and to check in to royal jordanian for my completely new itinerary, which typically goes through an airside desk. but here i went landside. took a while too. may have well just checked my initial bag and arrived in cairo to get it? but that would have also cost money for an egyptian visa. checked my bag in through to KUL. there are a couple private lounges the airports use here, the actual airline ones all appear closed. both here could be access with priority pass as well. a snap and some snackies from each.
