Looking back over my 2019 business class passenger experience, the worst gift this year was the discovery that British Airways flights to my home airport of Lyon were departing from London Heathrow's Terminal 5 instead of Terminal 3. I’m well aware that there aren’t a lot of good reasons to fly British Airways around Europe. The most convincing is British Airways'  virtual monopoly of Heathrow short-haul from the UK, successful takeovers of the competition like BMI, and the fact that the only closer option is Flybe, an airline renowned for its appalling customer service, nickel-and-dime carry-on bag capriciousness, and tendency to cancel flights and replace them with buses. READ the top 20 safest airlines for 2020. That said, BA’s Avios points redemptions in Club Europe are decent enough value, especially when traveling with a surfeit of luggage (unsurprising over the holidays), and especially when, as I do, you have a lengthy drive (three hours) to the airport and need to leave extra time in case of disruption, at which point a business class lounge is a very welcome stop. In Terminal 3, that’s great: the oneworld lounges from Cathay Pacific and Qantas are excellent, and even American Airlines’ is better than BA’s dim, dingy bunker of a space. In Terminal 5, it’s all BA, and unless you’re departing from the remote satellites your choice is Galleries North (at, unsurprisingly, the north end of the terminal) or Galleries South (at the south end).

Galleries North is on the same level as security but is always full. Galleries South requires what I’ve always found an insulting frogmarch through the Heathrow duty-free shopping: down a level, along the shops, up a level, around and up another level until you get to the lounge. (Incidentally, you don’t know which lounge is best until boarding time: while B and C satellites are marked on the FIDS info screens, there’s no helpful suggestion as to whether it makes the most sense for A gate passengers to visit the North or South lounges. So guess who gambled on South because it’s bigger, only to discover that he was boarding from the gate furthest from it?) The bones of the two spaces aren’t bad: Galleries North has a lot of natural light and the spacious terrace area, although Galleries South always feels a bit dim and dark. All in all, for the mid-2000s, when these lounges were created, they were fine, if even then a little underprovisioned. The mid-2000s, seemingly, was also the last time they were cleaned, because they were filthy dirty throughout, and not the sort of superficial “it’s the holidays and the kids have been flinging Pringles about” or “BA hasn’t specified enough cleaners in its outsourced service contract” mess either. We’re talking dark stains set into the tatty carpet tiles kind of filth, caked-on drips on the sides of furniture that in any case is so banged about that it’s embarrassing.

The food concept for the lounge is, and has been for over a decade, “brown or red gloop on white or beige carbs”, and while I think that’s fundamentally not good enough for business class it is what it is. This trip, though, was particularly unappetizing: something masquerading as beef shin risotto was essentially a thick meat gruel, while the cassoulet tasted like it was straight out of a tin and the peas-and-carrots mix right out of a freezer bag. Joke what you will about British food, but there’s so much good grub to be had in the UK, even inexpensively, that this is just another embarrassment. Further embarrassment comes in the lavatories, for which there seemed always to be a queue for the ladies’ but never for the gents’, although the absolute state of repair of the cubicles was shameful.

And as for the wifi? A speed of 2Mbps on an airline without fleetwide connectivity is just insulting. All in all, BA is lucky it has no competition on nonstops to non-hub airports from Heathrow. Even now, I think I’d rather drive a little longer on one end of the trip — whether on the French end to go via Geneva to fly Swiss, or the UK end and go from Bristol or even the not-hugely-great Manchester to take Jet2 or easyJet.