Tier Point Run to Sofia in Nov 2024: Day 1 – London Heathrow LHR to Sofia SOF

I arrived at T3 not long after 4:15 a.m., and there was already a decent queue for BA check-in.

Luckily, I already had my boarding pass, so I headed up to security, which, of course, wasn’t open. I had another few mins before I had the pleasure of being the first passenger of the day to head through T3 Security into an empty departure lounge. Although, there were a fair few passengers in that queue by the time they opened up at 4:30am.

The BA Lounge didn’t open until 5am, but at least I knew which gate my flight to Sofia would be leaving from: the dreaded Gate 24 – a bus gate.

I had forgotten to plug my phone in to charge last night, so I had plugged it into the car USB socket for the hour-long drive, but for some reason, it hadn’t worked.

So, for the first 20 mins of my visit to T3, I had to plug my phone in at one of those public charging points to get my phone up to a decent level.

The Christmas trees were up in the T3 departures lounge, so I guess that must mean that we are close to the big day? Perhaps not. Early November is a bit early, even for me.

I joined a short queue waiting for the BA Lounge to open at 5am. BA weren’t going to be flexible – the doors opened at 5am on the dot.

Into the First Lounge and the coffee machine was my first stop. Although I prefer a Starbucks, a latte from the machines in the BA First Lounge is more than acceptable.

Although originally we were supposed to leave from Gate 24, it was switched to Gate 11 fairly late on. The benefit was that it was the closest gate to the BA Lounge. Saved me a bit of a slog up to Gate 24.

The downside of using the closest gate and the early departure was the lack of steps ticked over on my Fitbit!

I like to do a full terminal walk prior to departure, and it didn’t feel quite right getting onboard without having done at least 5k steps.

Departure time was brought forward by 5 mins, and once in the holding pen of Gate 11, boarding started 30 mins on the dot before that new departure time.

Group 0 was called first, which confused one or two passengers. I was glad to sit down in seat 01F and avoid the cold bus transfer to the aircraft. I was also looking forward to some breakfast!

We pushed back a few mins ahead of the earlier departure time and in the air by quarter past the hour. I had the starboard side of row 1 to myself.

It looked like there was another priority passenger in 01A on the other side of the aisle. That turned out to be Dan, who I had the pleasure of meeting when we arrived in Sofia.

Only 5 rows of business class. Perhaps a bit early for most hardened frequent flyers?

I was offered a menu and a glass of orange juice before the breakfast service started.

It was fair to say that breakfast had been left in the oven overnight.

The scrambled egg was that hard. It was so hard that I could stand a knife up in it.

The mushrooms were tasty; the bacon ok; the sausage seemed like it had seen better days, and the grilled tomato was OK.

I had power at my seat, much needed to top up my mobile.

We landed about 30 mins head of scheduled arrival time, and it was only a short taxi to Gate B7.

It looked like it was going to be an easy B2B, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

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