Recently we flew from Manchester to Chennai (India) and return. To minimise long airport transfers we flew out via Doha with Qatar and back with BA via Heathrow. What a mistake that was!
The Qatar flight was excellent, although the connecting plane to Chennai was considered a short-haul and didn't have entertainment. Good food, quality entertainment. Doha airport is huge and incredibly busy even in the early hours of the morning but once we'd been bussed to the terminal everything was smooth with minimal checks, just hand luggage being passed through a scanner. Very efficient. Chennai has a new airport and we passed through Indian customs with little queue or fuss.
Coming back, what a disaster! The BA plane offered us the worst airline food I've ever had (and we used to do cheapie longhauls with Monarch!) The entertainment package was terrible, all the music selections were of bands I've never heard of or cheap "live" sessions culled from the BBC. The films were hardly the latest either. Only minor positive was they came round with water and juice reasonably often.
Heathrow was an absolute nightmare; we had two hours connection to Manchester but barely made it due to all the transit passengers having to go through a full baggage check and search despite having this done at our initial airport.
Hate to be a BA defender, but this post just misses the point.
Security:
- Qatar trusts UK security and doesn't trust Indian security. That means at Doha, passengers on flights from Britain walk straight into the departure hall. Passengers from India have to go through miles of corridors to the transit security point at Doha.
The UK doesn't trust security from anywhere so re-screens everyone. It just happens you flew through Doha from the UK, not India.
Transit:
- I actually find Heathrow not too bad if you are staying the one terminal. Two hours is pretty abnormal and points to some sort of meltdown in the system which, unfortunately, happens more often than it should.
Doha is just a single terminal so is 'easier', but it's also absolutely massive and you might have to walk for a while. They also do crazy things like having two late-night Heathrow departures leave at exactly the same time from opposite sides of the terminal (just checked and they've moved them five mins apart now).
Busyness:
- Doha is extremely banked. I can assure you (as someone who once had a 12 hour delay with Qatar), the airport will be dead after the bank of flights leaves. Heathrow is incredibly slot constrained so isn't banked. Flights are, relatively speaking, spread throughout the day on BA. Though some destination have peak times due to time differences etc.
Money:
- Qatar is state-owned vanity project. It's purpose isn't to make money - it's to promote brand Qatar and to make Qatar accessible from around the world. BA is a privately-owned profit-making (they hope) airline.
Entertainment:
- This is very plane dependent. If you go on a Qatar A320, the entertainment system is pretty poor in terms of what it offers and screen quality. Their 787-9s are absolutely fantastic.
BA is similar. Fly on one of their new A350s and the range of entertainment and quality of the equipment is better. I actually think HighLife (their IFE system) is one of BA's strengths.
Service:
- Definitely agree that Qatar provides, on the whole, better food and more attentive service. Though they certain things to their advantage like no discrimination laws and being able to fire and deport staff with zero consequence. BA can't fire someone for being in their 40s or being a bit podgy.