Heathrow, terminal 5 and BA!

Following my holiday being ruined by BA ground staff at Heathrow and Athens airports and by the terminal staff ?employed by Heathrow terminal 5!
I wish to make their treatment of disabled travellers apparent to the general public!Your advice would be appreciated.

Daily Mail and Sunday Times who have a very good Travel section.

Simon Calder of The Independent is the best campaigning travel journalist. He appears on BBC breakfast too. I would imagine a direct approach to him would be the most effective way of publicising your experience.

You beat me to it MiceElf. I have the impression that he is a good chap.

Do you tweet? That always is picked up by the companies involved.

Apparently they don't like facebook either. I am not a facebook user so not sure how putting something on there works.
I have only flown from Heathrow once and decided that if it was the only way to leave the country I would stay at home.

Twitter seems to be the site that bad companies fear most.

I suppose we could all put up a post about the dreadful treatment of a friend. Even of our privacy setting are at the highest, the cookies still work. But I wouldn't want to be swamped by ads from HR.

How do approach this Simon chap? I've never done anything like this before.
I normally just mutter to myself, but this was unbelievably bad!

Google his name and you can get to page where you can email him - came up straight away --- good luck - pity you had a bad experience there.

Thanks!

Simon Calder is the best suggestion so far. this is his website and there is a form for contacting him. You can agree (or not) to having your query published.

We've always written to the Guardian or the Observer with things like this [they used to have a page where they sorted out all sorts of problems]. Amazing what a bit of bad publicity can do [and you could get some financial compensation too].

C4 news have been running a long campaign about the problems of disabled travellers . You could tweet them

I'm not so worried about compensation. More about the fact that my usual enthusiasm for travelling has got up and gone!

They sometmes sit up and take more notice if it hurts them financially as well. Sorry you had a rotten time .

Galen - last year I also had a bad experience at Heathrow Terminal 5. We flew BA and they were fine; the Terminal Staff on the other hand were not. I have to have assistance at airports as I cannot manage the distances so we always request a wheelchair - this normally works well. However Terminal 5 was a disaster - total disregard for disabled passengers (I was not the only person affected). We wrote to BA afterwards to complain and BA passed on the complaint to the company who employ the terminal staff. A month later I hadn't even had an acknowledgement of my complaint; I wrote to BA again and they said they would chase it up - never heard a thing from that day to this!

It really is a scandal; normally at airports my treatment is very good (particularly in the US), and I am ashamed that my country can't do as well at their main airport.

Needless to say we won't be going away via Heathrow any time soon.

They use the excuse that the porters are a private company. I replied that as they engaged them they are responsible!

galen do you want us all to tweet for you?

Galen "You and yours" Radio 4 might be a very good place to start. They do regular pieces about Airport and other travel issues for people with varying types of disabilities.

Glass yes please! I don't tweet! I only witter!

Another complaint sent to @HeathrowAirport on Twitter re this thread

Posted on my Facebook page too.

And mine, and on the Gransnet Edinburgh one too (I am no longer the editor, but I seem to still have access, so I have added it)