Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
BA is liable to reimburse thousands of passengers for refreshments and hotel expenses, and travel industry commentators have suggested the cost to the company - part of Europe's largest airline group IAG - could run in to tens of millions of pounds.
i) Customers displaced by flight cancellations can claim up to £200 a day for a room (based on two people sharing), £50 for transport between the hotel and airport, and £25 a day per adult for meals and refreshments.
ii) On Saturday, travellers spent the night sleeping on terminal floors at Heathrow on yoga mats provided by BA.
i) These figures do not exist anywhere in the EU261/ 2004 legislation.
ii) These people cannot claim for the costs of overnight accommodation under
the above provisions since patently they did not contract said accommodation.
Harsh evaluation ? Yes indeed. But who ever believed the politicians and the HR bods when they said repeatedly that "life was fair" ?
(Indeed the simple fact that the vast majority of passengers at both LHR and LGW could not contract such provisions due to the elementary logic which dictates that all hotels will have been full within, let's say 4 hours of the incident also substantially limits the
de facto bill under EU261, I would say. Though obviously the world wide ramifications must be borne in mind as well. Likewise the issue of a much smaller number of potentially much more costly compensation claims furth of EU261.)
The question of some
ex gratia offer being made in the next few hours to assuage the current tsunami of negative publicity is also a factor I believe though as, unlike several posters here it would appear, I only know of the major players involved through often ignorant and biassed press publicity filtered through expensive
PR companies, I am not in a position to speculate on the probability.