2025’s big trip: India! Part 1: SFO-LHR on an A380

As readers will probably notice, it’s now travel season for me again!  My next set of trips is to India for a wedding.  All the flights on this trip were on British Airways, so I’m planning to mix up these flights up with some other posts, so everything is going to be a bit out of order.  Though that’s actually been a common theme this year, where I’ve had very strong clusters of flight activities. 
For this trip to India, I had 6 flights over 12 days booked on three separate tickets:

The first two flights were actually the return portion of my March trip to Europe: San Francisco to London Heathrow to Dublin in Business Class.

The next three flights were booked on an award ticket that I was able to use an upgrade voucher from the other Michael to book: Belfast to London Heathrow to Chennai (and back to London Heathrow) in Business Class.

The final flight was also booked on an award ticket: London Heathrow to San Francisco on British Airways in First Class on their A380.  In total, that’s 2 flights on A380s, 2 flights on 787s, and 2 flights on A320-family aircraft. For those keeping tally, that’s three visits to London Heathrow airport on this trip.

This was my first flight since British Airways rebranded its award program to be “The British Airways Club” and my first flight on British Airways being credited to American Airlines.  This year is the year that I hold both British Airways Gold status and American Airlines Platinum Pro status, which both afford me Oneworld Emerald status, so I was still able to use the First Class check-in line.  That being said, I’ve never flown BA from San Francisco and actually seen a line at check-in. 

After checking in and clearing the shockingly unorganized TSA precheck line, I proceeded directly to the lounge. 

The British Airways lounge had changed little since my previous trips. There was still a hot bar, which offered British-inspired food options (i.e. curries).

As you’d expect, before the A380 flight, the lounge was very busy.  The only available seating was in the dining area, but that was ok by me because I had had a late breakfast in anticipation of a late lunch in the lounge.

I went and grabbed a small selection of cold cuts from the cold buffet area:

And then ordered a flat bread pizza. But it took a solid 30 minutes to arrive, which is way too long in a lounge context, especially for a simple flatbread.

I also learned what the pattern is to boarding directly onto the aircraft from the BA lounge: A380s can’t park at gate A5 (which is interesting to me given that it has multiple doors and jetbridges).  So, when it was time to board, everyone made their way over to A11, which has three separate jetbridges: 1 for First Class, 1 for the upper deck, and 1 for everyone else on the lower deck.

I really enjoyed that they had a seat plan in front of the gate:

It was both very cool to look at and also probably helpful for figuring out if you needed to go up or not.  I had specifically selected an upper deck Club World seat because those have the additional storage along the sides, and I cannot stress enough how much of a game changer those storage cubbies are, even if the upper deck’s curvature limits your head space somewhat.

Regular readers will recognize that this is the same seat as my flight from London to SFO in November of 2023.  It is, in fact, exactly the same seat because it’s seat 53A on aircraft G-XLEA.

Upon arrival at my seat, I was given a pre-departure glass of champagne (and then shortly after takeoff, I was given a glass of sparkling water).

This flight departed at 6 pm, so the menu for this flight consisted of dinner (after takeoff) and breakfast (before landing).

I selected the golden beetroot and asparagus salad to start.  I’ve had their soup before, and it’s usually perfectly fine, but a beetroot salad is easy to do well on a plane since it’s served cold.  And I was correct—everything was plated nicely and was appropriately fresh.  The starter came with a roll (not the classic tri-bread roll offered on flights departing Heathrow) and a quinoa side salad.

Next, for the main course I selected the cod machbous, really just by elimination.  I don’t eat beef, and I have historically had very bad luck with pasta on airplanes, so the only main course that left was the cod. 

It was as good as it looked, which is to say, not great.  Finally, I selected the tiramisu as my dessert.  It was better than the main course, but mostly because it was just fine.  It wasn’t really a tiramisu, but more like a tiramisu-flavored cream dessert.

After dinner, I took advantage of the business class seat and went to sleep.  As is generally the case for me, I can sleep decently well for about 5 hours on these types of flights, but I pretty consistently wake up when breakfast service begins because of all the clanking and activity (even if this seat is plenty private).

I selected the fresh fruit platter as my breakfast starter, but as you can tell by the blurring picture below, the breakfast pictures did not turn out very well.  But I did get an almost acceptable picture of my waffle. The waffle is a huge step up from the pancakes they used to cater on this route.

The breakfast service finished about an hour before landing, and we arrived into Heathrow right on time and didn’t even have too bad of a taxi to the gate. Next stop: the BA Gold Lounge! (After passport control and transit security…)

In summary, I appreciate how consistent this route is for British Airways.  The British Airways lounge continues being an average outstation lounge that is a step up from the Admirals Club, but the in-lounge service remains sub-par (3/5).  This specific A380 Club World seat continues to be my favorite in their fleet, but I’m definitely excited for the A380s to get Club Suites so I don’t have to play the game of trying to select this seat immediately (4/5). The meals were both very good, except for the cod (4/5).  The flight crew was good, but nothing particularly memorable in either direction (4/5).  The IFE and WiFi were also just average (3/5). Overall, the flight gets an 18/25, which is just slightly above average.

I booked this flight as part of a Dublin – San Francisco – London – Dublin itinerary. Based on the way the miles credited to my American Airlines account, it looks like this flight nominally cost about $1 300. However, I will note that I actually earned miles off a total of $2 462 of “ticket price”, even though with taxes and fees, the overall ticket only cost $2 396. This is to say that I earned more miles on each of the flights on this ticket than I should have as far as I can tell. I earned about 12 000 AA miles off the flight and around an additional 5 000 AA miles by putting it on my AA credit card. That’s an overall return of around 20%, which is pretty good!