BA have cancelled my flight. What are my options?

[Espada III]

Brief summary.....

Booked BA from MAN to TLV for a return trip 9 April 2014 to 23 April 2014 via LHR. Tickets booked for five of us months and months ago.

We received an e-mail yesterday from BA that the LHR-MAN return flight has been cancelled and we have been put on a earlier flight which leaves Heathrow only ten minutes after our flight from Tel Aviv lands. The chances of us making this connection are therefore effectively nil. I have checked the website and there are no later flights back to MAN.

I do not want to stay overnight in London at anyone's expense nor do I want to cancel the whole trip, as flights to TLV are now at least 25% more expensive than the price of these tickets.

What obligations to BA have to me? What are my rights? Can I force them to rebook my return trip to the next morning, so that there is a sensible flight back to Manchester, at their cost, even its more than what I paid?

Thanks in advance of any assistance you can offer.

[mad_jock]

Depends if its ticketed as a through trip or individual legs.

If its individual legs you have no rights at all

[Hotel Tango]

If they have rebooked you with an impossible connection, then yes you can insist on being rebooked for the previous or following day at no extra cost. However, it will depend on availability.

[Espada III]

I rang BA this morning and was advised by a very helpful customer service agent that the change would have been checked manually in the next couple of days, the problem realised and I would have been contacted.

So they are letting us move the whole return trip by 12 hours to the morning flight the next day which has a decent one hour connection in Terminal 5. They are also letting my wife move her outbound earlier by three days at no cost, as our plans have changed since the flight was booked. So well done BA.

Bit of a pain in principal though, as BA are returning to their old timetable from about 18 months ago so that the last flight of the day to Manchester leaves too early for connections from the mid-evening arrivals into Heathrow. They should take a leaf out of Lufthansa's book.

BA indeed - more like London Airways.

[WHBM]

.....was advised by a very helpful customer service agent that the change would have been checked manually in the next couple of days, the problem realised.
Which seems to show that BA res themselves have discovered that the computerised system is flawed and they have to check them all again. A system that doesn't do invalid connections is not rocket science.

In following up this particular issue I looked at ba.com for the flight from TLV on this date, put it in as the outward leg, ticked the "one way only" box, and got an "invalid return flight date" error message. There's a whole long-running thread over on FlyerTalk about bugs in the BA res system. Is it about time that the BA non-execs on the board put the Director of IT under scrutiny.

[One Outsider]

Good service from BA Shouldn't you just have left it at thanking BA for bending over backwards to accommodate you?

[Capot]

One Outsider


Assuming that your post doesn't have a hidden and amusing meaning, which I missed because I'm very slow in the mornings, perhaps we should remember that BA caused his problem in the first place, and then compounded it by offering an impossible connection.

I don't think they "bent over backwards"; I think they finally offered an acceptable solution to the problems they had created, with some residual inconvenience to their customer.

[jubilee]

Could try the Easy Jet direct flight next time, from Manchester.

[Espada III]

I could, but at the time of booking, the EZY flights had not been released and they do not fly every day, so sometimes I have to fly via London or Europe to fly on a day that suits me rather than EZY.

As it happens, if BA has not been accommodating for my wife, I would have take a cancellation of her trip and booked her on the EZY two days before the original trip departed.

[mixture]

which has a decent one hour connection in Terminal 5.

Erm, you are aware BA TLV goes from T1, aren't you ? :hmm:

[edi_local]

Erm, you are aware BA TLV goes from T1, aren't you ? :hmm:

By April the BA TLV service will have moved to T5.

[mixture]

By April the BA TLV service will have moved to T5.

I see.... didn't know that, but then don't care much about the TLV route ..... "been there, done that, got the postcard - twice" as far as I'm concerned, don't have any reason to go back there and can think of much better holiday destinations.

[Hotel Tango]

mixture :confused::ugh:

[mixture]

Oy vey ... what can I say.... some people love the place and can't get enough of it.... but for me, second time round, saw the bits I hadn't seen before and couldn't really see much need to go back in a hurry. You can get the warmth, food and culture elsewhere in Europe without having the security hassles and messy and sometimes questionable political background.

[Espada III]

Mixture, please don't assume your preferences are similar mine.

There are a whole variety of reasons I choose to travel to Israel 'en famille', many of which you may or may not understand depending upon your knowledge of Judaism and its culture and practices. Your comment about food reveals all there is to know about your lack of knowledge.

If it were not for these reasons I may also choose to holiday elsewhere. But I do choose, so don't be so crass as to conflate the policies of a civil government with the historic connection of a people to a location.

PS Just as only Jews can tell a Jewish joke; don't use 'oy vey' unless you really know what it means.

[mixture]

Espada III,

please don't assume your preferences are similar mine.

People are entitled to their opinions. It is a free democratic world and people are able to express those opinions.

So I'm perfectly entitled to my opinion that if you have/want to go to Israel for religious or family reasons then be my guest. But if you don't, there are many other better options in the European region.

Are you seriously telling me that you've never in your life expressed an independent opinion on a holiday destination ?

Your comment about food reveals all there is to know about your lack of knowledge.

I know a lot more about good food than you think. The food in Israel is nothing special..... sure if you go to the right places its good.... but its nothing special that you can't find elsewhere in that region and the mediterranean in general and is certainly not worth putting up with the security and political situation in Israel for.

don't use 'oy vey' unless you really know what it means.

According to the dictionary....

indicating dismay or grief (used mainly by Yiddish-speakers), late 19th century: Yiddish, literally 'oh woe'.

I don't see anything there about it being derogatory or racist, and I also note the words "mainly used by". I think you know full well that it's use is fairly widespread outside the yiddish speaking community.

I apologise if you misinterpreted my intentions when using it. I think its somewhat obvious that I did not intend to insult an entire religion, which is what you seem to want to construe it to be.

How about we let sleeping dogs lie, and agree to disagree ? On both the use of 'oy vey' by non-practising human beings and the pros/cons of visiting Israel ?

[Hotel Tango]

mixture, you got involved in this thread with a useless piece of information which was duly corrected. In part response you went into a personal mini rant about Israel as a holiday destination. This in fact had NOTHING to do with this thread, hence my :confused::confused::ugh: post. Back off and leave it be now.

[Businesstraveller]

I had the misfortune to book a non-refundable return ticket to Madrid with BA a year ago or so. The misfortune lay in the fact that I had to cancel the trip and received no refund. I contacted BA to cancel the flight, which they duly noted and that was that.
Imagine my delight, when one week before the departure date I got an email from BA stating that the scheduled flight was being cancelled and would I like to re-book or have a 100% refund? I happily accepted the 100% refund of my non-refundable ticket.
Lovely-jubly.

[LuisOl]

I suffered something similar two years ago but I don't recommend you to claim alone, airlines are a little bit bad with passengers!