Colin
How to get your bicycle ruined
Heathrow to Porto via Lisbon with a bicycle was a complete disaster. I arrived at Heathrow well before the flight for TAP to tell me the bike (in a box) wouldn’t fit on the airplane. This alone was a ridiculous lie. So, they charged me more than the original ticket cost to change my ticket to a flight 12 hours later, and charged me for the box and charged me for oversized baggage. The bike box arrived in Lisbon soaking wet, torn open with bike parts missing. I patched the box for the Porto flight and arrived 14 hours late. I spent the next two days getting parts to fix the bike, not cycling on holiday. The web site dysfunctional. $100AUD in phone calls could not verify if I had booked the correct bag type on my return flight. English speaking call centre staff do not speak English. All attempts to claim the damaged parts for the bike or the unused bag costs have failed. The complaints web site is a complete waste of time and doesn’t work when uploading images of the invoices. The baggage and ticket charges amounted to about five times the original ticket cost – to wreck a bike.
I will note BA flew the same bike from Heathrow to Fiji with zero additional charges and zero damage.
If you are traveling with a bicycle avoid this airline.
Everything went very smooth
Everything went very smooth. The real question, however, would be if there was an insurance claim of some sort. That would be the true test. Fortunately I did not have to go there.