BA operates relatively small aircarft on their LHR-ATH flights. By small I mean single aisle. It’s about as far as I like to travel on an A320/321 with their seats.
Lounge
BA operates a small lounge at ATH, which is located adjacent to the BA gate. However, as Security is broken up by groups of gates you need to leave a little time to get through to the boarding area. The lounge has a mixture of soft and hard seating as you can see:
It’s well decorated and the staff are helpful. There is WiFi but a shortage of plug sockets.
The food is, however, excellent. Pre-prepared salads, nice cakes, sandwiches and snacks are an excellent example of how BA performs when it does well.
There is a good range of papers and magazines, a wide range of soft drinks and a tea/coffee station.
The only bad part was the business man who decided that socks and shoes were not required and so provided a display of his feet:
Of course he sat next to me on the flight so I ‘enjoyed’ the same view for the next 3 hours.
Flight
The plane has a hot meal scheduled and indeed there was a choice of fish or chicken. Below is the chicken, served on the tray:
The crew were attentive, but largely absent whilst they served the rest of the plane. No holding at Heathrow (!) and we arrived at a stand in the main terminal so it was fairly quick to get out and on the way to my next flight
Overall
Perfectly OK, if average, BA flight.
Flew BA Club Europe last year LHR-ATH-LHR. Your description is very accurate but omits mentioning that the Club Europe seats are essentially coach seats with an unoccupied fake seat as middle seat. Meal/service was definitely up to snuff. We almost had a problem as they cut off boarding early at LHR, but that seems to be happening quite often everywhere these. We made the plane but just barely.
Very very hard to get seats in summer when use miles and hard in off season too
Hmm – I was there a few months back and pretty unimpressed with the food offering TBH. Hardly any crisps/biscuits, the OJ wasn’t that fresh and a few old sandwiches. No cakes. Perhaps it varies by time of day but it was pretty full in the run up to the evening flight so I would have hoped for better – not even close to ‘excellent’ I’m afraid!
I also tried the Aegean lounge (not great although pretty big) and the Swiss lounge (quite nice, comfortable seats, good views) as both of them were on Priority Pass and my flight was delayed by an hour. WiFi in the BA lounge was also poor, as limited to 30 min or so per device using just the airport free wifi.
Overall not a great lounge IMHO. As for the bare feet – it’s a hot country, I really don’t have an issue with somone taking their sandals off! (don’t try visiting NZ or you’ll find it much more shocking :D)