May 30 2017, 9:00am, The Times
BA accused of profiting from trapped passengers
British Airways was accused of exploiting passengers’ misery yesterday amid claims that travellers affected by the global IT crash at the weekend were made to pay for expensive upgrades to reach their destinations.
The airline faced criticism over its response to the chaos after it emerged that trapped passengers had to spend up to £800 to gain access to spare seats in premium economy cabins. It was suggested that BA may fail to reimburse in full passengers who had to travel with other airlines, despite some being landed with bills of up to £1,600.
Some of the 75,000 delayed passengers had been required to pay up to 55p a minute to access a BA hotline from their mobile phones to lodge claims for compensation.
The company admitted last night that almost 25,000 of the passengers had still not been able to travel and “a significant number” were without their luggage. BA restored its full flight schedule at Gatwick yesterday and was operating a full long-haul schedule at Heathrow.
However, about a tenth of short-haul flights from Heathrow were cancelled, affecting at least 15 departures for destinations such as Amsterdam, Belfast, Copenhagen, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Milan and Stockholm. The airline said that it expected to operate a full schedule of long-haul and short-haul flights today.
Spanish-listed shares of International Airlines Group, which owns BA, Iberia and Aer Lingus, fell 2.5 per cent yesterday, with warnings that the company could face a compensation bill of up to £150 million.
Álex Cruz, BA’s chief executive, who is understood to be paid £830,000 a year, faced calls to resign. The Spanish businessman, who took up the post just over a year ago, broke a 48-hour silence yesterday to give his first interviews on the failure. He blamed a major “power surge” at 9.30am on Saturday. He said it “collapsed our IT systems”, knocking out the airline’s flight, baggage and customer communication technology.
Mr Cruz said the surge was “so strong that it rendered the back-up system ineffective”, causing an “outage of all our systems” at 170 airports in 70 countries. Power companies denied that there had been any supply problems at the company’s main hub at Heathrow or the airline’s headquarters, north of the airport perimeter. SSE and UK Power Networks, which both supply electricity in the area, said that there had been “no power surge”.
The GMB union blamed a decision last year to outsource IT jobs to India as part of a cost-cutting measure. Mick Rix, the union’s national officer for aviation, said yesterday that he had written a number of letters to Theresa May when she was home secretary complaining of the security risks from the move, but they were ignored. BA denied that the outsourcing had played any part in the IT failure.
Mr Cruz has already been criticised for withdrawing free food and cutting legroom in some aircraft. One passenger tweeted: “Álex Cruz destroyed British Airways and made British Airways a national embarrassment. He has to go.”
Alex Macheras, an aviation consultant, said: “The idea that in 2017 an airline can be brought to its knees for three days because of a simple power issue is extraordinary.”
He told of two women whose flights to Tel Aviv were cancelled on Saturday, with a replacement failing to take off on Sunday. They were understood to have been given seats on a flight tomorrow but only if they paid £800 each to upgrade to premium economy — the only space available.
Confusion also surrounded passengers who had to travel with other airlines, with BA saying that booking “via different carriers would be at your own expense and would have to be claimed back through travel insurance”.
Some passengers faced paying 9p a minute on a landline or 55p from a mobile to call an 0344 compensation hotline used by the airline. BA said that they could use an alternative 0800 freephone number.
Mr Cruz said: “We have been giving letters to customers telling them how to claim under EU compensation rules and we will fully honour our obligations.”
Shares in IAG, the owner of British Airways, lost around £380 million of their value in early trading in London, dropping 3 per cent to 596p.